The Tactical Uncertainty Principle

Advanced Squad Leader did an excellent job with morale. Previous editions of this particular game manfully attempted to address communications and control, albeit in a clumsy manner that was not very gameplay-friendly. But few, if any, games, have successfully addressed the issue of information in war on the tactical level. What passes for “fog of war” is largely limited to something like the ASL concealment mechanism, in which line-of-sight immediately results in full and correct disclosure of the enemy forces. And while this makes sense in light of the obvious limitations of tabletop gaming, it is somewhat strange that computer wargames have not substantially addressed this issue to the best of my knowledge.

So, my thought is this: what if line-of-sight provided unreliable information in the manner Clausewitz describes? What if one benefit of unit experience was the ability to correctly identify enemy units as well as their quantity? There is ample historical precedent after all. One need only read a history of any post-Normandy WWII battle to realize that American troops were prone to misidentifying almost any German tank as a Tiger.

To most American troops, any big tank trying to kill you was a Tiger. Admittedly, the sloping frontal armour of a King resembled that of a Panther Tiger, but a soldier in trouble doesn’t stop to count the road wheels or turn to his recognition handbook. Similarlly, many Allied memoirs talk of being under fire from ‘eighty-eights’, whereas msot German field and anti-tank guns were of 75mm calibre.
– Snow and Steel: Battle of the Bulge 1944-45 by Peter Caddick-Adams

The mechanism is relatively simple to implement. For each unit, there is a short catalog of mistaken quantities and types based on probability. One is much more likely to mistake a 75mm field gun for an 88mm than for a 37mm, after all. It is obvious that troops tend to overestimate their enemies rather than underestimate them, both in terms of quality and quantity, so the tendency should be to err upwards. Both the visual and statistical information reported to the player will be inaccurate, then updated as other units make contact or sustained contact causes the initial units to correct their initial error.

It seems to me that this could be as important an advance in wargaming as the ASL morale model was. So, what do you see as the likely costs and benefits of implementing an Unreliable Information model, or if you prefer, Tactical Uncertainty principle?Just because a number of gamers and game designers have expressed interest in it, I’m going to run through my thinking on the subject in public. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I conclude that this could be the most useful new wargame design mechanic since John Hill introduced the morale model in Squad Leader. Also, I’m not going to concern myself with how to implement the principle in a board-and-counter or tabletop game yet, since my primary interest is developing a model that will work for Striker (3rd edition) in the 3DV engine, which is to say, on the computer in a 3D tabletop. While the principle remains the same in either case, the precise model of optimal application will necessarily differ.

The basic Tactical Uncertainty Principle, which is based on the Clausewitzian concept of friction in the form of information, can be summarized thus:

•  Information reported by LOS is unreliable.
• The reliability of the information reported depends upon the quality of the unit or leader reporting it.
• Units reporting inaccurate information tend to inflate both the quantity and the quality of the enemy units reported.

Today, I will focus on the second aspect of the Principle, which states that the reliability of the information reported about the enemy units spotted depends upon the quality of the unit or leader reporting it. For now, I will utilize the five-level unit-quality system of ASL. Here is how I envision the application in terms of pre-modification statistics, with the number representing the percentage chance that the unit will accurately identify the unit(s) sighted.

Elite 85
Veteran 70
Regular 55
Green 40
Conscript 25

A unit with a leader of differing quality will identify an enemy unit on the basis of the leader’s quality rating rather than its own. A unit with the same quality leader will receive an addition 5 percent identification bonus. So, a Veteran unit with an Elite leader will identify enemy units with an 85 percent success rate, but an Elite unit with an Elite leader will do so at a 90 percent success rate.

Q&A

Will multiple units with a LOS on the same enemy unit make independant roles and report potentially contradictory information (and is there a clean UI for showing this)?

Yes. Yes.

How often will units reroll for possible updates?

Once per enemy movement turn.

Can there be multiple units stacked in a given location and if so, can a unit go entirely unnoticed?

Yes, in the case of a board game and no in the case of a miniatures game. And yes.

GameBrain: the time penalty

In designing the two-tier answer system for GameBrain, it was obvious that correct fill-in-the-blank answers had to be worth more than correct multiple-choice answers because they are much harder. However, when we decided to incentivize faster multiple-choice answers by reducing the value of a correct answer by as much as fifty percent if the maximum amount of time (10 seconds) was utilized, this raised the question of whether we should apply the same point-reduction to the fill-in-the-blank answers as well.

However, we ultimately decided against that, because it would give an advantage to players who read faster and type faster. Reading faster isn't much of an advantage in multiple choice because the question has already been read and the timer starts anew when one moves from FIB to MC. But typing faster is a big advantage, particularly when there could be a 12-point difference in six seconds. So, we decided to keep a flat point reward for fill-in-the-blank no matter what portion of the 12 seconds is used, and start the penalty gradient for multiple choice at the 3-second mark.

This playtests well, and the only potential issue that remains is if there should be any penalty for waiting most of the 12 seconds one has to do FIB before hitting the spacebar and moving to multiple choice.

Submission time

We've decided to go ahead and submit Elveteka. We've also put a short gameplay video up on YouTube.