1917 Russian Revolution: Why the Reds Won

Battletech fans, examine this photo closely:

Then go read this!

 

Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame

John Curry, editor of the History of Wargaming Project, has a new book out:

I first wrote about Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame almost two years ago in The Origin of Battletech. At the time a new edition of the book was still in the works, so I waited to get it. This edition includes some previously unpublished material from some of Pratt's original players and umpires.

My copy is on order, and I'm looking forward to seeing it soon. Maybe I will organize a local play session? 

Information link: http://www.wargaming.co/rules/fletcherpratt/homepage.htm

Purchase link: http://www.wargaming.co/purchaserules/homepage.htm

A few more minutes in the library

I received the following email, apparently from a young person, so I won't reveal the name:

Hi im 14 and ive loved modeling since i was 10. I have 3 dioramas Railroads Cut, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania/ The Battle of the Hurtgen Forset, France/ and one that i made up and created when i was 11 Bloody Ridge, Kentucky. I am know working on the battle of waterloo and was wondering do you have any tips for me i have already painted 80 bristish and prussian and 15 French calvalry and am working on the french foot soldiers. I am hoping to get a large board than i have know but any terrain tips or details?

There are many sites on the internet where you can find such advice, but I have a different suggestion: Go to your local library and look for books on "military modeling", "model railroading", "Civil War history", and anything you can find by Sheperd Paine. Browsing those shelves of related hobbies can show you more in a few minutes than you will find in hours of Googling the internet, because library shelves aren't sorted by keywords. 


That doesn't mean you won't find the same information with your favorite search engine, but it's hard to search for ideas you don't know exist. Look in your library - because libraries are absolutely full of good ideas. You will be pleased with the results.


This is good advice for anyone who enjoys games, miniatures and modeling. DO NOT limit yourself to learning only from others within a narrow segment of your hobby. Reading some of the bulletin boards, you might get the impression that painting miniatures is nearly exclusive to just one or two games, and nothing could be further from the truth. Make a serious effort to study what others are doing, and bring back what you learn to make your own hobby work even better.

Blue versus Gray, or maybe Federation versus Rebels?

"Mr. Business" left me a good question on my last post about Gratuitous Space Battles, and it deserves a good answer.

N.B. writes: As an alternative, what about special anti-fighter weapons? Perhaps a frigate type ship that can act as picket against fighter waves. Specialized weapons can overcome numbers in many cases.

And

Like American Civil War. 100 Grays with rifles vs 3 Blues with a Gatling gun. On the open fields of a typical A.C.W. battlefield, your 3 Blues are going to win.

To the first part about specialized weapons, GSB lets you do just that. There are anti-fighter missiles and tractor beams to help shoot down those pesky little space-piranhas. Of course, big ships can carry heavy armor that is nearly impenetrable to fighter weapons, so it helps to have a few big ships with big guns to soften up those hard targets. Real battles are complicated, with many factors influencing the outcome. Lanchester's Laws are a simplification down to the bare basics of the number of men and how effective the are at killing the other guys. This demonstrates a principle of warfare; the advantage of superior numbers and why it exists, but it doesn't begin to cover all the possibilities that real situations allow.

The second part though - the Civil War example - is something that can be described nicely by Lanchester's Law (squared law). I'll change the number just a bit for my convenience though.

Suppose we start off with equal sides: 100 Blue and 100 Gray soldiers, each side equivalently armed with Rifle Muskets, and each able to shoot freely at any soldier on the other side. These sides should be approximately equal, with 100 soldiers on one side going to receive about as many casualties as they deal out to the other.
A game-like example will be useful: If we set this up as a game played in rounds, and give each soldier a 2% change of killing one of the other soldiers each round (completely arbitrary, just bear with me), then each side will lose about 2 soldiers each round (at the start) and the winner is probably just a matter of chance.

Now lets change it up - lets give the Blues Gattling guns (or maybe Uzi's?), and lets say that these BIG guns inflict casualties on the other sider 25 times faster that the old muskets of the Gray's. Now the Blue team is 25 time more effective, and therefore 100 Blues should now be equal to 25 times 100 equals 2500 Gray soldiers. Right?

Nope, 'fraid not, at least not according to Lanchester. The Squared law tells us that the advantage of greater number is proportional to the square of the ratio of the number of soldiers on each side. The Gray's can balance the Blue advantage with just 500 soldiers, not 2500, because a 500-to-100 is a ratio of 5, and 5 squared is 25. The reason behind this is that ever time Blue suffers a single casualty, they lose a greater portion of their total firepower.

Back to my game-like example: If each Blue soldier now has a 50% chance of killing a Gray soldier each round, and the Grays are still at 2% but there are now 500 of them, then there should be about 50 Gray and 10 Blue casualties in the first round. Now the ratio is 450 to 90, still 5-to-1, and the sides are still balanced. Under the differential equations of Lanchester's Laws, these to forces will grind each other down always at this 5-to-1 ratio until both sides are dead.

Now if this game has any bit of randomness, or as in reality things are not always equal, that ratio will not stay at 5-to-1 for very long. Before many rounds of fire are exchanged one side will gain a slight advantage, and that advantage will expand in to a victory without killing all the soldiers on both sides. If Gray bring 600 soldiers instead of 500 they should win this game every time, and this still isn't half way to 2500.

We could play this game differently too. Instead of giving Gray more soliers we can take away some of the Blues. With their BIG guns, just 4 Blues should be equal to 100 Grays. Now the difference in the casualty ratio really shows, because after just one round Blue will have 2 soldiers left, and Gray will still have 98. 20 Blue to 100 Gray should be about even (but don't hold me to that, because I make mistake when I'm tired and do math in my head).

That said, I haven't really done justice to N.B.'s Civil war example. There probably were Civil War examples of 100 Confederates charging a Union Gattling gun and getting torn to peices. As I said before, it's complicated! I'm no student of Civil war history, but I know it was a time of changing technology and tactics. A few decades earllier and 200 musket-wielding Grays charging straight at 100 similarly armed Blues was probably a winning tactic, but 200 Grays charging 100 Blues - who by-the-way have a few of Mr. Gattling's latest inventions - I think that might not work out so well for the Grays.

Math versus Tanks

This story at Wired tells how statistical methods were used to estimate German tank production during World War II:

How Allies Used Math Against German Tanks

The Germans had given each tank a production number, and each captured tank provided information about how many more tanks were in the German army. If you capture 10 tanks, and the highest production number among these is #800, then you know there are at least 790 other tanks out there. If you can assume these tanks were captured more or less at random, then it is unlikely that tank #800 just happened be be among these 10, and the 10 numbers observed ought to be spread out unevenly between 1 and 800. The total number of tank should be something just a bit more than the highest number you happen to know.

Allied intelligence noticed each captured tank had a unique serial number. With careful observation, the Allies were able to determine the serial numbers had a pattern denoting the order of tank production. Using this data, the Allies created a mathematical model to determine the rate of German tank production. They used it to estimate that the Germans produced 255 tanks per month between the summer of 1940 and the fall of 1942.

Turns out the serial-number methodology was spot on. After the war, internal German data put der Führer’s production at 256 tanks per month — one more than the estimate.

That's a very good estimate. Are the statistics here really that good, or did they just get lucky? Using the formulas in the article and my example above with 800 the highest number observed out of 10 captured, the estimate of total number is equal to 800+800/10 - 1 = 879, with a margin of error (~1 standard deviations) of plus-or-minus 88, or about 10% of the estimate That's not so bad given that I only "sampled" 10 tanks, but there is a lot of room for error. It gets better as the sample gets larger though. It turns out the variability of this estimate is inversely proportional to the sample size, 10 tanks give a standard deviation of about 1/10, or 10%. Bump that up to 100 tanks and the standard deviation is 1/100, or 1%, and now the estimate is precise enough that your military planners won't care about the error.

This isn't the only example of statistics in war; many basic quality control methods were originally devised as part of the effort for World War II.

15 Games That Will Always Stick With Me, Too

I picked up this meme from D20 Sapphire's post at 20 Sided Woman:

The rules: Don't take too long to think about it. 15 games you've played that will always stick with you. List the first 15 you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what games my friends choose.

You can probably tell this originated from Facebook, but like my friend Sapphire I'm going to skip the tagging part and link back to her instead. When I started my list I thought I would have trouble coming up with 15 games, but within 5 minute I was already trying to decide which ones to leave out. SO many choices! At risk of over-thinking the question, I have split this into two parts: board games/RPG's and computer/console game (of any sort), and Honorable Mentions are included along the way. Each will be roughly in chronological order, starting with the board games:

1. Risk (Parker Brothers) - I would go to slumber-parties with my friends and play Risk and Monopoly for 12 hours straight, fall asleep, then wake up and play for another 12 hours. We never got tired of playing (but we did eventually get tired). Honorable mention: Monopoly.
2. Dungeons & Dragons (TSR) - Starting from the blue box, I played all I could when I was a young teenager.
3. Ogre/GEV - Originally published by Metagaming, and Steve Jackson's first published game. This was my introduction to the "map, chits, and dice" wargame. Honorable mention: Warpwar, also by Metagaming.
4. Air War (SPI) - I'm skipping a bunch of other games to list this one. I played many combat/battle board games, but Air War was sort of the apex of these games for me. Air War is quite complex, and as much a simulation as it is a game. Honorable Mention: Armor (Avalon Hill?), a great tank combat game.
5. Traveller (then GDW) - Science Fiction role-playing. I played quite a bit, but it wasn't until I hooked up with a college gaming group that it really started to shine for me.
6. Champions (Hero Games) - Another game I found in college, and with the same game master, my friend Pat (who also GM'd Traveller). Honorable mention: The Fantasy Trip (Metagaming) - Another game by Steve Jackson. This was an a very simple RPG based on the Microgames Melee and Wizard, and the basis of the two best fantasy RPG campaigns I ever played (One GM'ed by Pat, again!).
7. Battetech (then FASA, now Catalyst) - Fastforward about 10 years - graduation, job, grad school, job-hunting, marriage - where I didn't play board games at all. I did play some computer game version of Battletech, Solaris 3025 (online) and Mechwarrior 2, and I bought a rulebook so I could understand the computer versions better. I wan't until I took a job in Milwaukee, started going to GENCON (when it was still here), and fell-in with a group of die-hard Battletech players that I really learned to love the board game. Maybe more importantly, Battletech re-awakened my love of painting miniatures, something I still enjoy just as much as playing.
8. Squadron Strike (Ad Astra Games) - 3D science fiction space combat, and I get to help the author with some of the mathematical aspect of the game too - something I ought to be writing about!

And now the computer games, which I hate: 

9. Asteroids (arcade) - I plunked a lot of quarters into arcade video games, and this is the game that started it. Gamers much younger than me won't recall a time when video and computer games didn't exist, but I do. I'd like to think that all of today's gamers would still be gamers even if there were not any electronic involved at all, but for many kids today, computer and console games are all there is (which is sad). Honorable mention: Donkey Kong.
10. Hack/Rogue - This amazing little dungeon crawl game was being passed around among the computer science students when I was in college, and I found it incredibly addicting - and still do. I have a version on my Palm Pilot now, and still play it from time to time. Honorable mention: Empire.
11. Harpoon - A computer version of Larry Bond's miniatures game, and a great naval warfare simulation. Honorable mention: 688 Attack Sub and Sea Wolf - Two submarine simulations that I spent a lot of time with. These games typically have long intervals of increasing tension as you hunt your target (or vice-versa), punctuated by a few minute of heart-and-keyboard-pounding excitement when the torpedoes start to run.
12. Master of Magic - Sort of a cross between Civilization and Magic, the Gathering. This game offered many different choices during setup that allowed for variety and interesting play.
13. MUME (Multi Users in Middle Earth (MUD) - A text-based "dungeon" adventure devoted to re-creating Middle Earth. This was my first experience in online gaming, and a terrible this to discover during graduate school, because it threatened to suck-up my every waking moment. I was never able to get a fast connection though, and this generally resulted in BAD things happening to my characters when this started getting tough, so I finally wised-up and focused on studying instead. I still log in every few years to see if there are still any of the old players still playing there (and there are). Honorable mention: Doom + Quake - Two games I refused of purchase because they definitely would have made me flunk out of grad school.
14. Starcraft - I've got to have an RTS in here somewhere, don't I? 
15. Gran Turismo 2 (Playstation) - The only console game I'm listing here, because it's the only console game I've spent much time with. Even then, I had to get up early on Saturday mornings to run the longer races (100 laps) before my son want the PS2 for himself. This isn't so much a game as it is a driving simulator, and it's as close as I'll ever get to driving a real performance car too. I have the newer editions of the game too, but they don't have the same memories.  Honorable mention: Netrek - Another online multi-player game, one if the first of its kind, and a whole lot of fun. This got demoted to "mention" status because I haven't actually played it all that much.

That's my 15 games I'll always remember, but I already know what number 16 will be:

Honorable mention: Gratuitous Space Battles - My first computer game purchase in a long time, and I am really loving it. Look for a proper review on these pages sometime soon.

Avalon Hill founder Charles Roberts passes away

Charles S. Roberts, Train line expert and founder of Avalon Hill games, died on August 20th. He is more well known for his writing about railroads than for his games, but the games are what I know.

In 1958, he founded Avalon Hill Co., a Baltimore game publishing company that specialized in war and other mental combat games such as "D-Day," "Stalingrad," "Battle of the Bulge," "Gettysburg" and "Victory in the Pacific."

See the full article at the Baltimore Sun:

Charles S. Roberts, train line expert, dies at 80

[Big Hat-Tip to Brant at Grog News]

Update: Christian has a much better article on Charles Roberts at Cinerati.

Battlemech Recovery Vehicle, circa 1962

Click thru for more on this at Big Lorry Blog.

The Battle of Waterloo in Miniature

The work of René "Mr Waterloo" Betgem.
You might want to stand by on the volume control - the cannon get kind of loud.



More (MANY MORE) pictures to be seen at www.miniaturewaterloo.com. Here are just a few (below). These pictures are part of Mr. Betgem's fourth Waterloo project, and I am simply amazed. You will be too.


Great detail work in these close-up shots.


Very nicely done smoke effects, and just look at the depth of this diorama.


Now go visit Miniature Waterloo already!

Update: My links to Rene's blog are no more. Try this Google Search instead.

The Origin of Battletech

I was reading a review of the Battletech games universe at BoardGameGeek when I came across this fascinating comment:

Lance McMillan wrote: ... Weisman's basic system for Battletech was an obvious derivative of the ancient (1930's vintage) "Fletcher Pratt's Naval Battles" game: players rolling dice to determine the location and extent of damage inflicted by each individual weapon, and then checking off little boxes on status charts to keep track of the totals. ...

I had often wondered about predecessor games to Battletech. I assumed they existed, but I had never seen one. A little voice in the back of my head tells me I knew science fiction author Fletcher Pratt wrote a naval battle wargame, but I never made the connection until now.

My interest peaked piqued, I dig a bit more and find this old Sports Illustrated article:

Pratt was a writer and a naval expert (before he died in 1956 he had written some 60 books about naval and military affairs), and one day, in 1929, "bored with seven-card stud, backgammon and craps," he and a group of maritime minded friends decided to invent a naval game. They bought a division or two of model ships, pushed back the furniture in Pratt's living room and set to gaming. By the time they were done, they had come up with the rules for a mammoth contest that required up to 60 people on a side, a large ballroom to play in and vast fleets of accurately scaled ships, and the Naval War College started sending down experts to take lessons. [See The World's Most Complicated Game at SIVault, it's a good read.]

Pratt's game even had its own version of Battevalue:

There was a vast formula for calculating the fighting power of each ship: (Gc[2] X GN + Gc'[2] X Gn' + 10TT + 10A[2] + 10 A'[2] + 10A" + 25 Ap + M) Sf; + T, and elaborate tables for telling each captain what had happened to his ship when the turn's shooting was over.

What that formula means I have no idea, but now I want to find out. I located a source for the original rules at John Curry's History of Wargaming Project, which also has more details about the game:

One of the main facets of the game, the gunnery, is commonly decided by dice. Therefore, games can seem to consist of large numbers of dice rolls reflecting the low hit-rates of long range naval gunnery. To many, the sheer number of dice can make the game seem dull. Pratt aimed to change this by using estimating ranges as a way of determining hits. He also experimented with shooting, darts and tiddle-winks against paper silhouettes as alternatives, but he settled on estimating as the final method. The inspiration of using estimating the range for gunnery accelerated the pace of the game and gave naval wargamers control of the most important aspect of the naval warfare, namely hitting the other side.

It even has it's own miniatures.
OK. I'm sold. I want it, if only to satisfy my own curiosity, and it is available from Amazon.

After communicating with John Curry, it seems that Featherstone's book only summarizes the rules, and the full rules are not currently in print. Mr. Curry is currently working on a new book which is to include Pratt's original rules and more. I might have to wait until that is available.

[Images Amazon Look Inside!]

*** UPDATE 5/22/09 ***

I had another email from John Curry informing me he has opened up his ship cards for download. Here is an example.

From what I can make out, the lower portion is a list of total damage accumulated (1st and 3rd unlabeled columns), and the 2nd and 4th columns give the effect of damage on the ship. At the point where the ship has accumulated 10,721 points of damage, it is only capable of moving at 8 knots, has lost 6 of its 8 "4.7 inch" guns, and 3 of 4 torpedo tubes.

This is simpler than a Battletech Mech sheet, but it serves the same function.

See also: Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame