Games with a real-life strategy feeling

Are you impressed by Napoléon’s strategy at Austerlitz? Well, you should be! It is one of the most decisive victory on a battlefield against an overwhelmingly superior enemy. Fighting at 1 vs 2, with no major technological, the French “Grand Army” shattered its counterparts with very limited losses.

What are we looking at? A thin flank to bait the enemy followed by a strong push in the center to split the opponent forces and cut the retreat lines.

That’s it. We can go into the details, but basically there is not much more to it. Real life strategy, from Cannae to Desert Storm revolves around simple ideas. The issue is that there are really few games that can simulate this. No IA will likely be defeated by Napoleon’s plan. What you will often have to do too, is micro managing your units, performing series of mini encirclements, basically achieve victory through a series of tactical decisions where you exploit the flaws of the computer. There is no perfect answer, human or IA, but some games did cover some aspect of warfare pretty well.

Coordination and asymmetry of information: Artemis Space Ship Bridge Simulator

In this independent video game that I strongly recommend, each player assumes one position in a spaceship. The 6 roles are Captain, Navigation, Weapons, Engineer, Communication and Science. The players do not see the same thing on their screen. For example the engineer does not see what is happening outside the ship. He has to rely on information from his colleagues to know when to divert the energy to shields and weapons, when he has to focus on speed to escape and where he should send the damage control party in priority. The navigator and the weapon specialist do both see outside the ship, but the navigator does not see if torpedoes are ready, which enemy ship is currently targeted. He has to get the information from the weapon specialist who in turn must know which maneuver is planned to prepare his strike. Hit and run with a nuke or surprise attack for the back with shield disrupting torpedoes? All the while the captain try to coordinates the team, the science officer monitor the star system for new threats and give intelligence on enemy shields, and finally the communication officer try to coordinate ally ships and space stations. The game shines because communicate is not an option; it is plain and simple mandatory.

Artemis is chaotic with real tension. You see limitation in the ability of people to absorb information or to communicate efficiently. You also see the usefulness of a leader. If there is a game that can prove that bad leadership is better than no leadership, it is Artemis. It is also a good illustration of the chaos that will be provoked by the first blasts in an untrained unit.

For those that are interested, it is not a difficult game in term of mouse clicking and rules. Artemis can be taught in 15 minutes to complete beginners. You need to buy 1 copy of the game for the group, and then you are authorized to install it on your friends PC to play together. Note, it does not need to be as dramatic as on the video!

Fog of War and Uncertainty: Le Vol de l’Aigle

The Vol the l’Aigle is a traditional wargame with referees that plays very well by email. The campaigns have an historical setup (Napolenic Wars) and can be played by very large group of players with each one incarnating a general and its troops. The only thing that you know is where you are, and what your troops see and do. Each turn the referee gives you an update on what happened to your troops, which communications you did get from other generals etc…

So you are marching your troops across Belgium with only one day old updates on the position of your fellow allies when you encounter enemy troops. Are they a vanguard? The main force? Should you engage and send for help or can you deal with this yourself?

Because there is a referee to run the game, the player has a lot of liberty in his action. He can send patrol, divide his forces, give precise orders all out attack or just testing the enemy resolve? How to use his reserve forces? Resting, fortifying a village etc… What is great is that you do not have to know all the rules by heart. Most of the mechanics are handled by the referees so that you can focus on the strategy. The biggest uncertainty is the situation, not the roll of a dice (but there are many dice behind the scene).

Incomplete control: Heart of Iron III

Let’s start by saying that I am not a big fan of Heart of Iron III. But here is the interesting part; I did not like it precisely because HoI 3 features the best AI control of your troops that I have seen. You organize your army in theater-army-corps-divisions and from there can delegate actual movements of any part of it to the AI.

Let us say you are Germany in 1940. Here is an example of what you can do to invade France:

• Tell the HQ West to attack towards Paris and watch the show as on the History Channel.
• Tell one army group to Attack Amsterdam, another to push towards Brussels, another to defend along the Maginot line, and the rest to carry an all out attack in the Ardennes. After 2 week of attack, you update orders to complete a major encirclement of the Allied troops.
• Give real time orders to 100+ divisions and their support brigades and attached aircraft units

I could not resolve myself to delegate control to the IA and there were too many units to control myself, so I gave it up despite being a huge fan of HoI2 and its numerous mods. But if you can delegate, HoI3 is definitively a great experience, which gives you a feeling of real-life strategy, with broad troop movements emerging from the chaos. You are the general forging the tool and leading the way, but that’s it, you cannot micro manage your way to victory.

Links to awesome strategy games:

Artmemis

Vol de l'Aigle

Heart of Iron

 

Update: Other recommendations from BoardGameGeek: 

Kriegspiel One of the first wargame ever. Developed for the Prussian army. Need a Referee.
Scourge of War  PC game, apparently fun: Quote from BGG poster Eker "Ride up to the higher ground and use your binoculars. Send a courier with your orders (He can be shot). If you are lucky a courier may show up with reports that are many hours old."
Solomon Sea A lot of modern naval games have been mentioned. It seems that a good naval simulation has to include fog of war mechanisms. For exemple on Solomon Sea, quote fron BGG poster Lancer4321 "Based on my experience as an officer on group and fleet level staffs, I've found that Solomon Sea provides a very realistic feel for how naval operations are conducted at that level. You don't deal with minutae, instead you focus on the key decisions that an actual staff would be concerned with, and all the details are handled abstractly by the system."

I have never been in a combat zone, nor intend to, so if you think I missed a major aspect of what warfare really, let me know. And more importantly, let me know which game covers it. 

EuroExark