Section Leaders:
Fionn Kelly & Madmatt

“X Hexes of Y meters by Z = A Dinosaur”
by: Fionn Kelly

 I know many of you don’t have any idea who I am or what my history with wargaming has been, but basically I’ve bought pretty much every World War II wargame I could get my hands on for the past 13 or 14 years. 

Currently I am alpha testing Combat Mission, a soon to be released wargame from Battlefront.com ( http://www.battlefront.com ). I believe the design and game play of Combat Mission is going to change the way gamers view and play tactical wargames and in this article I’m going begin to attempt to say how that is going to happen.

Throughout these years, all of these wargames I’ve played have had systems in which reality has had to be “fitted” into hex-based, massively abstracted systems and I have learned to accommodate these abstractions so instinctively that now I play within the constraints of them even when they no longer apply.

Replaying the battles of old has meant accepting as “given” many major dyshistoricities (and in some cases complete ahistoricities) as well as learning to see the real-world battles and battlefields I’ve studied and read about within the context of these game system limitations. 

The most obvious dyshistoricity is the representation of hexes. If, for example, a hex is 50 metres in size then what happens to a unit which moves 75 metres per turn? Essentially; a design decision must be made to have the unit move either 1 or 2 hexes per turn. It is impossible to move it 1.5 hexes since the entire idea of a hex is like binary code. Something is either there or not there. It is either a 1 or a 0; it cannot be a 0.5. Several games have tried to circumvent such issues by making the minimal divisor exceptionally small so that the effects of “rounding up or down” are minimal but STILL these systems contain some level below which no discrimination of movement, combat results etc. is possible. How does Combat Mission differ? By simply creating a three-dimensional battlefield in which total freedom of movement occurs with a far greater level of detail, hex-abstractions are largely removed. Certainly a minimal level of discrimination is present but this level of discrimination in Combat Mission is measured in centimetres and not in multiple metres as in other games. This one factor opens avenues of realism previously blocked by the dictated distortion of abstraction.

Certainly, the Close Combat series of wargames also supports far more exact levels of discrimination for lines of sight and fields of fire. However, LOS and FOF in the Close Combat series is pre-calculated in such a faulty manner that there are many gamer complaints of enemies having clear lines of sight and of fire to a specific friendly vehicle without that friendly vehicles being able to achieve a reciprocal line of sight to the enemy firing at it. Clearly this is an untenable situation and shows the limitations and undesirability of pre-calculation of such important aspects of military wargames. I much prefer the “on the fly” method of calculating LOS used in most 3D games and find it a superior solution myself.

So, to come back to my point: I’m sure many of you have at least as long a history in wargaming as I have, if not longer. To all you I say that you should, “Get ready to unlearn.” This was one of Steve’s favourite sayings to me during the first days and weeks after I got Combat Mission. I still thought in terms of hexes to target and expected my units to be able to fight whilst many hundreds of metres from their headquarters. Was this thinking unrealistic? Yes. So, why did I, someone who has spoken loudly in support of realism in wargaming fall into such an unrealistic pattern of thinking? Simply put I believe the reason is that I have been conditioned by all the other wargames I have played before. 

Steel Panthers, Close Combat, TOAW, Cross of Iron and all the others I could mention here contain many common design assumptions which ensure that the design decisions and game play systems in each game will be extremely familiar to anyone who has been playing wargames over recent years. It is our misfortune that the design decisions and game systems in all of these wargames feature several aspects that reward unrealistic command behaviors and punish realistic behaviors. Like all good wargamers and military thinkers I firmly believe we have all adapted to our environment (the wargames we played) and have, therefore, picked up many, many “bad habits”.

Hexes and command and control modeling are two very obvious areas in which most recent wargames have a common, basic, shared genesis. Having such shared genesis and maintaining common assumptions certainly increases the acceptability of the program in the market. Everyone involved, namely the gamers, the programmers and the publishers and press, are innately comfortable as it “fits like a well worn glove”. Even grognards and others of that ilk are likely to be accepting, since the given design “progresses” in the same, incremental manner that most other evolutionary, but unrealistic and flawed offerings introduce themselves to the gaming world. To be fair, this approach eases the burden of designing the game as one is merely trying to fit a known and previously modeled combat situation into a familiar and accepted system.

Familiarity, in this case, has not bred contempt. Hexes and other design assumptions are loved by many of the old guard. This love perseveres irrespective of their utter inability to provide reasons for keeping them in the face of the advances in computer processing power which allow designers to run sufficient calculations to accurately model position and movement with pixel to pixel levels of accuracy. 

Well, I think the time has come to begin breaking from the hex-based, abstraction-laden systems to something a bit more realistic for SOME wargames.

At this point I just want to make clear that I do not wish to be seen berating hexes as so many real-time-only gamers do. I have far, far more hex-based games in my game collection than I do of any and all other game types. I think hexes most definitely had a role to play in the past when every kilobyte counted and computers, quite simply, would not have been able to deal with fully three-dimensional terrain with realistic characteristics.

 I also think hexes still have a place to play in larger-scale games in which their levels of abstraction are more acceptable and less apt to produce noticeably flawed results. However now is the time for wargames at a very tactical level to realize that the expectations of gamers, the increase in CPU speed and the advent and acceptance of 3D accelerator cards are all enabling and facilitating a move away from hexes at the tactical level. A change to truly three-dimensional representation of the battle and the units and actions occurring there is both possible and appropriate at this tactical level and drives straight towards the heart of the issue of realistic simulation that gamers crave.

Why would a three-dimensional map lead to more realistic outcomes? Well, quite simply since fired round, vehicle and infantry locations can be represented with far greater accuracy, the results of movement and explosions can be tracked to a far more detailed degree. Thus, it will be possible to differentiate between a unit moving seventy-four metres and one moving seventy-five metres with ease and to account for actions by and against that unit at the same time.  Throw in increased accuracy in LOS calculations, impact calculations, realistic, three dimensional representation of blast radii and calculations of casualties based on the distance of the unit from the epicentre of the blast (all of which are then accurately, visually represented) the realism and immersion level possible both increase drastically.

My particular area of interest lies in tanks and other varieties of armoured fighting vehicles and here the combination of accurate data and more specific unit location, facing and round tracking data combines to immensely increase accuracy. Let me lead you through a very basic example of only the most major factors that suddenly are much more differentiated and thus can be more precisely modeled in an AP penetration model. I will use Steel Panther as my hex-based comparison game but I could just as easily be choosing West Front or any other comparable games.

Facing of the vehicle relative to the shell:   Only 6 facings are possible with the average hex-based game. A three-dimensional game such as Combat Mission can model shells impacting from any and all of the three hundred and sixty possible degrees around a tank.

Angle of incidence of the shell:   This refers to the angle which the shell makes with the armour as it impacts this armour and is comprised of the angle of the armour and the nose-down angle of the shell (or nose-up if the shell is on the ascending portion of its trajectory). In Steel Panthers this simply isn’t accounted for except insofar as the slope of the armour is taken into account slightly (but not correctly) in determining the armour rating of all vehicles.

Round tracking:   Was the shell fired from a higher or lower elevation than the target? If it was then this will play a role in varying the angle of incidence once impact occurs which directly plays into the amount of armour the shell will have to penetrate to destroy the enemy tank.

Slope of ground:   Is the enemy tank on a slope? If the enemy tank is heading towards you down a steeply sloping hill of a thirty degree down angle when hit the angle of incidence between armour and shell will be reduced by thirty degrees which could make as much as thirty or more millimetres in shell penetration. Very often this will be the difference between a non-penetrating hit and a kill. Likewise the slope of the ground under your own tank plays its own part in determining the amount of elevation needed for your round to reach the target.

Is your tank in a hull-down position?  Good tactical move isn’t it? I have yet to see a hex-based game that models the extremely poor declination of Soviet main guns due to their low turrets. This has the effect of creating a large area of “dead ground” in front of any Soviet tank position on a significant elevation as it simply cannot bring its gun to bear on any enemy tank which approaches the base of the elevation. Can Combat Mission and any other game using a truly accurate three-dimensional representation of terrain incorporate such fine points? Yes. 

I know some of you will state that I am talking about minutiae here but I have heard several armour officers pointing this exact issue out as a major design flaw in much Russian armour and the Israelis used this exact failing when attacking Egyptian positions in the past. Hell, the BMP-2 has a dead space on its front left extending from 350 degrees and 295 degrees relative and has a main gun depression of only four degrees. Has this ever been modeled in a hex-based game. No. Can it be easily modeled in a truly three-dimensional game? Yes. This is a huge tactical flaw and is akin to the lack of a turret on turretless assault guns the taking advantage of which is one of the most basic and important skills learned by every wargamer.

ONLY a natively three-dimensional game can take full account of the three-dimensional angle of incidence between shell and armour which is the Holy Grail of correct armour penetration modeling. In current hex-based wargames there is absolutely no attempt to take account of three-dimensional angles of incidence since the engines simply cannot handle them. Hexes are far too crude for such fine and important calculations. Only a truly three-dimensional engine can utilize the myriad of data available to calculate this most important of components. This has been shown in some testing reports from the Combat Mission developers in which they found a single degree of incidence from the front of a Sherman caused the eighty-eight millimetre shells of a Tiger I to ricochet from the tank and not penetrate. Without the extremely fine levels of differentiation possible in truly three-dimensional wargames of which, as far as I am concerned, Combat Mission is the first worth discussing with serious, demanding wargamers this would simply not be possible.

All these and many more factors simply can’t be accounted for in the crude world of hexes. Hexes are wonderful for representing very large-scale actions where certain levels of abstraction are necessary. At present, however, to be frank, very finely scaled tactical battles are being modeled using hexes which are far too large to accommodate the realism claims of the marketing managers which are plastered all over the boxes of these games. Certainly the choosing of a suitably small hex scale would allow for more gradation of data and finer discrimination. Certain hex-based games recently have shown this by markedly reducing the scale of the game and the size of the hexes used to model combat. The result is that the combat in those hex-based games is more realistic than in most but at no stage will hex-based tactical combat allow for as fine a level of differentiation and gradation of results as will a three-dimensional representation of the exact same tactical combat. 

Combat is all about fine levels of differentiation and precise results. Getting a result right to “within half a squad” is no good when you are modeling a platoon-sized skirmish. Sure it might be fine when modeling the combat of an entire battalion but all too many hex-based games aren’t accurately modeling the battalions to “within half a squad” but are modeling platoons and lower to “within half a squad”. 

I think that a hex-based game can best be described as X hexes of Y meters by Z = A where X, Y and Z are all very large numbers which each contain many large abstractions and “massaging of numbers” to allow the figures to fit into the hex-based environment. “A” is the product of these numbers AND its accuracy has been degraded by the sum of all the myriad abstractions and massaging which occurred when calculating X, Y and Z.

Meanwhile the three-dimensional game, whilst obviously having to draw the line somewhere, can model several factors which simply cannot be modeled in a hex-based game and do so more accurately. Thus, the same problem, factored into a three-dimensional game such as Combat Mission can reasonably be described as X centimeters by Z by Y by M + N = A.

Greater levels of accuracy and the modeling of far more factors must, assuming correct research, yield a more accurate “A”nswer.

While I don’t think Steve, Charles or anyone else would claim Combat Mission is the most perfectly accurate wargame which will ever be made it definitely is something quite extraordinary and different from what we are used to. I visualize it as a first step down a road. Combat Mission is something new and different. It is not so much evolutionary as it is revolutionary. I think this will become obvious to others when they buy it and I think we will see the effect of Combat Mission’s release in the next generation of tactical level wargames. 

At present many companies are creating wargames that take advantage of the increasing prevalence of 3D cards to create lush graphics. From what I have seen, however, most of these efforts consist basically of a three dimensional graphic overlay of a traditional hex-based map. The end result is that whilst the game might look lush it doesn’t take advantage of the extra realism and immersive opportunities which I feel are afforded by fully utilizing 3D to actually MODEL AND RESOLVE everything that is going on in-game. A 3D overlay of an underlying hex-grid is still a game hobbled by the necessity of describing all movements, ranges, effects etc into the context of “x hexes of y metres size equals A”. 

Computer power currently is not capable of dealing with the extra calculations which realistic terrain modeling will enforce on large scale conflicts so I do not think strategic or operational level games will change anytime soon. Even if they did adopt a three dimensional terrain model, the level of abstraction currently present is far too extreme for such strategic level games to really benefit from the added detail. As many people have pointed out during the wait for Combat Mission, it is not enough to simply create a new system that has the potential for increasingly detailed, and realistic combat resolution. It is also necessary to research and utilize all the data available to take advantage of the increased possibilities for realism and detail. I happen to know, from being on the inside, that this attention to detail is being paid in full in Combat Mission and that AI actions and weapons performances are being constantly evaluated and changed on the basis of observed behavior and tester input. Just recently the behavior of tanks underwent some very important changes which I think will make them behave even more realistically (and selfishly).

Will we abandon hexes soon? No, I don’t think so. I think we will see a slow change in tactical wargame engines over the next few years. I think we will initially see three-dimensional graphics being utilized to create better graphics that lend more immersion to current games. The new Panzer General and Harpoon games are both examples of this, as far as I am aware. Soon, we will begin seeing games which begin to utilize real-world physics to a greater degree than is currently possible given the fact that any physics present in current hex-based games must fit within the constraints imposed by a hex-based system. The first steps will be tentative and slow. I imagine that round tracking and movement rates and LOS will be the first aspects which will benefit from the increasing usage of 3D in wargames but once three-dimensionality has proved its worth I expect more and more engines to be coded to be fully three-dimensionally functional in tactical wargames.

Hopefully such a change will also be accompanied by a move away from the IGO-UGO system that hamstrings so many other games. 

More of THAT particular can of worms next time.