Challenges for a Modern Wargame

[Easy E]

Greetings,

I was thinking about playing some modern naval games and was looking around at some rules.  Their are some interesting things out there, but I always like to think about the process of game design. 

Here are some challenges I see for making a "modern Naval Wargame"

1. Scale- The scales of modern weapons are vast, and the curvature of the earth is a real thing in Naval warfare.  How do you provide the right amount of scale.  I once saw a video trying to make realistic weapon ranges for a 6mm M1-A1 abrams tank.  The main gun could fire across the infield of a baseball field at scale.  Therefore, you will have to make adjustments and abstractions. 

2. Maneuver vs. Firepower- this is a corollary to scale.  Due to the range of weapons, how much can you actually maneuver without being limited by enemy firepower and still be acceptably plausible for a Modern Naval game?   

3. Multi-Dimensional Combat- Surface, Sub-surface, air.  The Battlespace is much larger and more complicated. 

4. Detection- There are multiple ways and methods to detect and multiple ways and methods to avoid detection.  Therefore, abstraction is needed to simplify this area. 


I would love to read what you think are challenges to Modern Naval wargame designers and some clever ways you have run across to overcome them. 

[Ruckdog]

I too share your interests in game design and modern combat!

The biggest sticking points to me are the scale and the detection issues you highlight above. Naval warfare got a lot more complicated once aircraft (especially jet aircraft) and missiles arrived on the scene. Consequently, engagement ranges in naval warfare have steadily grown longer and longer, and in many cases getting detected is equal to getting engaged, which is then equal to getting killed thanks to the lethality of modern weapons. Having your destroyer knocked out of action by an anti-ship cruise missile launched from hundreds of nautical miles away is realistic, but not very fun as a game scenario! It's not just distance that is a problem, its also time. With the speed of modern aircraft and missiles, a ship is practically standing still in comparison. It makes it very challenging to model the  movement of both ships and weapons on the tabletop.

It seems that the two approaches that have worked for modern gaming is either to pack in a lot of detail in a search for fidelity, in which case you get games like Harpoon, or to abstract things to the point where the game flows more smoothly and quickly, but doesn't capture reality quite as closely.

FWIW, I think my tastes range towards the latter. I think Rory Crabb's Naval Command game is a great example of this!

[Fracas]

Is scale and detection any different or as significant of a problem as with spacecraft games?

[Ruckdog]

Is scale and detection any different or as significant of a problem as with spacecraft games?

It could be, but space games have the advantage of being able to take on a higher level of abstraction than a game based on real-world combat. A lot of space games  I've seen (like BFG or FSA) more or less hand-wave range issues away by assuming that the ship is very tiny in relation to the battlespace, and the model is just a visual representation with its actual position being represented by the peg on the flying stand. While I suppose that something similar could be done with a modern game, it starts to push the limit (for me, at least) of the level of abstraction I'd like to see in such a game.

[Fracas]

I guess I have always assumed with miniature games the models were magnified to range scale

[Easy E]

I also lean towards abstraction.

I think a third approach I have seen is to try to hyper-focus on one small aspect of Naval warfare such as running a sub, ASW, missile interception only, etc. 

Ideally, I would like to play some tactical warship games...... but I don't think that is actually plausible without a heavy level of abstraction and "gamification" (as opposed to simulation) in a Modern Naval game.   

[Ruckdog]

I guess I have always assumed with miniature games the models were magnified to range scale

That’s mostly been my experience too. The difference lay in the degree to which space games tend to do it compared to terrestrial naval games. In BFG, for example, the model scale is about 1/40,000, and the table scale, while never explicitly defined, has to be on the order of 1 or 2 million to 1 based on the size of the planet templates. That works out to a table scale that’s about 100 times as small as the model scale. With terrestrial games, it seems like a difference of  10-20 times is more common.