By
THOMAS J. WILLMUTH,
Introduction
According to the game designer Norm Koger, “The Operational Art of War (TOAW) is a combined simulation and scenario editor covering military campaigns over the1939-1955 period.”1 It is a turn-based, constructive type war game using NATO symbology (or 3-dimensional) icons representing wartime units. Released in 1998 by Talonsoft computer software gaming company, the simulation won game of the year in 1998 from six popular computer gaming magazines.2 Norm Koger designed the game engine and several of the scenarios. Doug Bevard conducted the research and designed the “Crusader 41” scenario that will be used for the analysis of Operation Crusader.
The game starts on 19 November with British forces already past the wire into Libya. The game starts approximately where the German forces realized historically the presence of enemy forces and began to react. There are some Italian units frozen (Trieste division and some brigades around Tobruk) that the German player gains operational control after three days. This is to replicate the historical command and control situation that did not allow Rommel control over some Italian units until released by his Italian commander. The scenario plays in approximately seventeen turns. The number of turns can vary based on victory conditions, unit losses, and supply. Each turn represents one day and each hex represents five kilometers. Although this is a game designed for commercial entertainment, much of the appropriated expenses were dedicated to historical research and accuracy to give the illusion of a historical simulation.
In a game designed to replicate operational art, it is impossible not to include the tactical application of force, for a sum of tactical decisions will have operational implications. TOAW strives to maintain the illusion that the player is an operational commander, but when units engage the computer processing unit goes into overdrive to arbitrate the extensive laundry lists of individual tanks, squads and thousands of variables and combinations of a tactical fight. This is the strength of a computer. Even though the user of the game may be making operational decisions, the computer will still resolve thousands of tactical engagements to give the user the operational result. The successful commander must realize that to get the operational results he desires he needs to understand the tactical, behind the scenes, actions that lead to the results. The following paragraphs describe the mechanics of TOAW, how and why the game was designed, and its strengths and weakness for war gamers.
Unit Capabilities
Capabilities are based on the equipment assigned, proficiency, readiness, and supply level.3 Capability (unit strength) is basically the ability for the unit to attack and defend itself. It is broken into several categories based on the type of equipment the unit has and the type of equipment opposing the unit. The unit strengths broken down are:
Antiarmor: The ability to destroy enemy armor. A unit with tanks and antitank guns will have a higher antiarmor modifier.
Antipersonnel: The unit’s ability to destroy nonarmored equipment and personnel. Ten percent (10 percent) is also used as antiarmor. This represents the possibility that even an infantry unit has the capability to destroy armor, which often happens if unsupported armor gets too close to infantry.
Antiair (high): This modifier is the ability of the unit to defend itself from medium to high level bombers, or interdicting aircraft in the area.
Antiair (low): This modifier is the ability of the unit to defend against combat support aircraft (low altitude aircraft) or interdicting aircraft against the moving unit.
Defense: The unit’s overall ability to defend itself.
Reconnaissance: TOAW’s approach to reconnaissance is unique among current war games. It is based on the type of reconnaissance equipment available (armored cars, recon squads) and represents the ability of the unit to identify the enemy type and strength, as well as move by units. It also influences the unit’s strength at the beginning of the attack.4 For example, a combined attack with a friendly reconnaissance unit will greatly enhance your ability to destroy enemy forces for the first turn. After the first turn, the advantages of reconnaissance begin to wear off as units close for battle. Few wargames take the synergistic effects of reconnaissance into account.
Unit Experience and Proficiency
Unit proficiency is represented by a percentage from one to one hundred. This is the unit’s experience received in previous battles and continues to increase in subsequent battles. If a veteran unit receives too many replacements from battlefield losses, unit proficiency will go down. Unit proficiency is gained more quickly for less proficient units and more slowly for more proficient units.5 This represents the ability of new units to quickly learn the basics (usually by getting their nose bloodied), but also the slow process of advanced tactics that only a veteran unit masters.
Unit Readiness
Unit readiness in TOAW is basically represents troop fatigue, how far they have marched or long they have fought, and equipment wear and tear.6 A unit will lose some vehicles on a long march resulting in a degraded unit readiness, but if the unit does not move for a turn (representing one day), they will recover many of the vehicles plus replacements and normal supplies. The lowest unit readiness a completely fatigued unit can go is 30 percent.
Unit Morale
Unarguably unit morale is a critical element of warfare. Commanders for centuries have tried to tap into this encompassing combat multiplier with varying success, many looking for that magic formula that they hoped would guarantee the esprit de corps found in the most successful units. There are some key contributing factors that consistently improve or erode a unit’s morale. TOAW looks at unit morale at an operational level, where units tend to have a higher morale when they are victorious and when they trust their leaders, are adequately supplied and do not have equipment inferior to their enemy’s. TOAW addresses operational unit morale with a mechanical variable that takes a weighted average of a unit’s proficiency, supply level, and readiness.7
Unit Quality
The last of these unit variables that TOAW tries to quantify is unit quality. Unit quality is an average of a unit’s proficiency and readiness. Quality checks are made many times in a game turn to determine the unit ability to sustain an attack or hold their position against a determined attack.8
Deployment Status
The seventeen different unit deployment orders in TOAW attempt to give great flexibility to war gamers to tailor operational commands to units. As with actual orders to units, commands in TOAW are not absolute and the varying success the unit has in accomplishing the intent of the order depends on many variables. Some of these variables the commander can influence in the game. For example, if a tank unit gets an order to entrench to prepare for an enemy attack expected the next day, but spent much of the day just getting to the defensive site, as well as being low on entrenching supplies and fatigued, they will meet with limited success in gaining any defensive benefit from entrenching. The same unit well supplied and given adequate time will probably have much defensive benefit for the next day’s battle. Another variable that will help the entrenching unit is the assistance of a nearby engineer unit. It is not as simple as board games that used to depict defense as ‘unit doubled on rough terrain,’ but an elaborate system of comparing hundreds of variables of movement, time, equipment, morale, terrain, supply and command.
The tactical and local reserve options give the commander flexibility in not giving specific tactical orders, but intent. For example, the commander can delegate reserves only to travel five kilometers to assist a friendly unit, or have the same unit programmed to respond up to a day’s travel. There are some unit orders that the player does not have control over, or the unit executing them. When a unit is reorganizing from a high casualty battle, retreating, or routed the operational commander can do little in controlling the actions of the unit, but he can save it from possible annihilation by protecting it with other units.
On this subject it is important to note some of the game designer’s intentions, and why he left out some factors that many would think were critical to this stage of the game. In responding to this Norm Koger writes:
There are a lot of gamers who prefer the classic “5-5 attacks 2-2 in the woods (doubled) on the 1-1 column of the CRT . . . .” The current market does not encourage serious efforts at sophisticated modeling. It leads to unpredictability (unless you examine the units and environment in detail), can be difficult to debug, and is difficult and expensive to document. You can probably imagine how something that looks (with good reason) a great deal like 50+ pages of C code to be included in a player’s guide would be received by corporate HQ–particularly when very few players would ever read such a thing, and every page costs $$$. In short, even if you get sophisticated modeling in a commercial wargame, you’re not likely to see the kind of documentation required to fully evaluate it for your needs.9
Commercial wargames, like TOAW, have a “good idea” (market return) cutoff point. In development of TOAW, Koger acknowledges the magnitude of addressing simple combat analysis and its documentation:
Even TOAW’s relatively simplistic “calculate what’s available, line it up, and shoot at the bad guys” logic does not lend itself to simple analysis and is hideously difficult to document. Effect of initial reconnaissance declines as “battles” continue, short range weapons become relatively more effective if something (terrain, weather, time of day) restricts visibility. Long ranged weapons are initially less effected by the presence of things like water obstacles. The list goes on. Every class of weapons tends to be affected differently by just about every environmental variable you can think of.10
The anticipation is that TOAW minimizes the great limitations in computer programming at a tactical level by focusing on the operational level. Even with a player’s guide of 160 pages, TOAW cannot–does not attempt to–address every possible variable in combat.
Unit Movement
Although moving a unit seems simple, unit movement triggers many cascading events that can degrade a unit. A maneuver enthusiast will find in TOAW limitations that, if not addressed at the operational level, will doom him to defeat. For example, a mechanized unit marching the maximum distance it can travel for many consecutive days will leave many vehicles broken down by the side of the road, and the vehicles that make the journey in a state of needed repair. This adversely affects readiness and the unit combat capability. If this same unit were to stop its advance without other pressing orders, it would quickly regain most of its lost readiness. This pause will allow his vehicle recovery teams to police up the stranded vehicles, needed maintenance accomplished, and supplies replenished.
Unit Attack and Defend Orders
TOAW attempts to give the commander flexibility on the intensity of the attack or defense. In setting unit loss tolerances, how many casualties a unit will take before it will disengage, the commander can fight a determined battle or feint. There is no command to fight to the death, as most units will take only so much damage before they back off and reorganize.
TOAW attempts to reproduce the difficulty a unit has in disengaging in the middle of a fight. When a unit tries to disengage with a persistent enemy in TOAW several elements come into play. Besides the size of the units involved, their mobility and current orders, terrain and unit status, the ability to disengage depends on the type of combat equipment used to force the disengagement. Obviously armored cars and tanks are harder to stop from leaving the battlefield, but any unit that does not have some screening forces will take severe losses, if they are able to disengage at all.
How Aviation Is Used
Aviation units in TOAW are only given interdiction, air superiority, combat support, and rest missions.11 Game players focused on controlling every movement of their force will find his ability to tactically control their fighters and bombers extremely limited. Referring to this limitation in TOAW Norm Koger explains:
Even the grognard crowd has a limited ability to master a complex game interface. This limits the amount of fine control a game designer can turn over to players. In TOAW, for example, I did not give players the ability to focus the efforts of a specific air unit on a given stretch of road. The player can elect to have an air unit interdict (more likely closer to base, more likely on roads, etc, but still a generic global order), support ground units in combat, fly superiority, or (in a very limited way) strike a particular location. Clearly, this implementation has problems as a training tool for professional military folks. But as complex as TOAW already was, I was terrified at the market response to any imaginable interface that allowed micro management of things like individual air unit missions.12
A result of this operational command of air units allows interdiction of enemy forces, but not how and when. The game parameters are set up to look for enemy convoys along roads and heavily traveled areas. The player cannot determine which roads to interdict directly, but he can move his air units to bases that give him a higher percentage by close proximity of interdiction where he wants.
Intelligence
Most operational intelligence gained in Operation Crusader was from reconnaissance (ground and air), human intelligence, and direction finding (DF). This is replicated in TOAW by a historical estimation of assets available portraying a strategic reconnaissance percentage. The result is a seemingly random spotting of units behind the enemy lines depending on the enemy size, movement, and type. For example, the Eighth Army Headquarters unit, when not on radio blackout, is spotted within a hundred miles of the front.
Tactical intelligence is gained from the unit reconnaissance efforts. This success depends on the type of reconnaissance equipment available and the amount of time the unit has to determine the details of the targeted enemy.
Supply
Supply in TOAW is extremely complex. Almost every variable in the game modifies supply. Not only does movement affect supply as discussed earlier, but the proximity of roads is key to keeping the supply vehicles coming. Although tanks can go almost anywhere, the soft skinned wheeled vehicles that bring the fuel and ammunition ca not. Close proximity to the unit’s higher headquarters will also assist in more rapid supply replenishment. Lines of communication (LOC) are also important in receiving supply, particularly if an enemy unit is sitting on the only road your trucks can use. Adverse weather and time of day (particularly night) can greatly reduce supply efforts. A unit receives replacements the same way it is supplied. If a unit receives too many green replacements this will reduce unit experience.
An important operational supply function in TOAW is transport asset sharing. Units that do not use all their supply vehicles in supplying assigned units or moving are temporarily used operationally by their higher headquarters to supply other units.13 This is one way, operationally, the player can boost his inherent supply distribution shortage.
Weather
Weather significantly affects the battlefield in TOAW, usually negatively. Weather can slow movement by flooding roads frustrating coordinating attacks and resupply efforts. Bad weather can reduce reconnaissance efforts putting units dangerously close before detection. In TOAW, weather fronts and squalls can adversely affect some units while leaving others untouched.
Formations and Support Levels
An absolutely critical part of TOAW is formations and support levels. Unit cooperation determines how well two different units can coordinate an attack or share supplies. Two brigades from the same division and nationality can almost always cooperate well in an attack, quickly come to each other’s aid in the defense, and consolidate common ammunition types and parts for like vehicles. In TOAW, putting a German tank regiment in an attack with an Italian tank brigade results in cooperation penalties. There are several levels of unit cooperation, but in the above example (being about the worst) the difficulty of the language barrier, different commanders with different intentions, different types of equipment, different tactics, prejudices, and miscommunication make a difficult task of an attack almost impossible. About the only logistical support they could give each other is fuel. In most war games, the player has complete control over all his units to freely use any way he wants. This is not the case in TOAW. The commander must play close attention to the unit formations he throws into the attack.
The Map and Terrain
The map and terrain in TOAW is typical, for wargames, in hexagon use and terrain movement limitations for certain type units. Fuel usage depends on the unit type and terrain. Terrain effects combat for line of sight, defensive advantages, and reconnaissance. Roads are key to operational movement as well as airfields, cities, and ports for obvious reasons. The Crusader scenario map is custom made for operational movement and combat and does not have the detail required for tactical decisions.
Time of Day
There are inherent difficulties in a turn-based wargame for fair and adequate sequencing of movement and combat. TOAW address these difficulties in an extremely detailed method of time and movement. For the player, this system can be overwhelming in its complexity. Within a turn a commander can move, attack, see the results, and attack again. He can only do this if he fully understands the time and consequences of the movement and the combat his units initiate. For example, if a player moves his units only a fraction of their maximum allowable distance and sets up a hasty attack, they can continue to move and attack until the day’s allotment is used. But in this sequence, if the player moves a unit or the attack takes longer than anticipated, the movement for all units is used accordingly. The use of the time of day is critical in understanding the game and the sequencing of events.
Unit Generic Strengths
Unit strengths are the generic numbers shown on the icons. It is very important to understand that these numbers on the unit icons are for quick reference of unit strengths, and to ignore what calculations make these numbers seriously degrade player performance. These generic strengths are the sums of the total strengths in each category (antiarmor, antipersonnel, reconnaissance, etc.) for all assigned equipment, multiplied by the unit’s morale (scaled to fit the game displays). There can be a great difference between units at the low end (displayed strengths at less than 3) that show similar unit strengths.14
The Scenario Editor
The strongest part of TOAW is the scenario editor. A player can modify every aspect and variable of the game. There is not an event, movement or unit a player could not modify to exactly replicate his operational research. A determined player could not only modify scenarios, but also design a completely new wargame with the powerful scenario editor. Unfortunately, with no rules that required historical or even realistic allegiance, a player could design a game that looks and smells of operational value, but the extremely delicate behind the scenes algorithms can produce a historical and unrealistic battlefield pictures. For example, not giving a heavy tank unit adequate trucks will severely reduce the unit’s ability to get supplies, or giving that same tank unit a high reconnaissance rating without the supporting scout cars and vehicles will give it a huge unfair advantage in combat.
Conclusion
The building of TOAW focused on several challenges. First is the professionalism of the game designers to produce a product of their passion. They tried to build a bridge from board wargamers to computer war gamers enveloping every conceivable detail in combat realism, but there were limits. The first of these was resistance to change. Koger elaborates:
But most of today’s recreational wargamers grew up playing board wargames. For a lot of reasons, some things weren’t modeled very well in board wargames. Most gamers…feel themselves blindsided when a developer attempts to model things like disengagement, effects of local reconnaissance, or command control. I suspect these are serious issues for tools that military professionals would wish to use, but they can be viewed as potential problems in the design of a commercial wargame. This has the effect of encouraging developers to avoid complex or controversial models.15
This resistance to change leads into the second challenge, money. Thousands of dollars a year went into just the research of equipment and battles of TOAW. Although the die-hard wargame enthusiasts developing TOAW strive for every historically correct detail, they are limited by time and money. The game must make money. As important as the attention to historical detail are the bells and whistles. Over 40 percent of the total development effort in TOAW went to sound and graphics.16 The game must compete for sales with multimedia saturated games selling in the competitive market. The niche of buyers looking for a historically accurate war game can put game designers and researchers in the food line at the Salvation Army with just one game that does not make money. This results in compromises. Koger explains:
A game has to cover a topic that interests a wide enough market. The focus of the wargame market has narrowed to the point where only tactical games have broad appeal . . . . Anything that attempts to focus on a level higher than individual vehicles and perhaps a few thousand “soldiers” is considered too abstract. No matter how you dress up an “operational” level game, the guys making the decision of which games to put on their store shelves immediately think pocket protectors and taped glasses if they don’t see little dudes shooting at gnarly tanks on the back of the box. TOAW managed to sneak in under the wire.17
This is why TOAW is the best candidate for this research. In researching the game designers, understanding their intentions, and evaluating their product the realization came that of all the commercial wargames developed, TOAW might have value to the military historian. Besides winning “wargame of 1998” by several leading computer war game magazines, TOAW received the highest ratings of realism and playability from over twenty online computer gaming companies.18 One respected war gaming critic articulates well what most gaming critics said about TOAW:
This is the Big Boy 1998. No game in ’98 came close to achieving in the PC game world that Norm Koger’s . . . did. TOAW is possibly the best of its kind to see the light of day.19
On the outset the game has design limitations and marketing compromises that may reduce or eliminate any historical value. But it also has a professional intent and historical detail that has the potential of great merit to the student of military history.
1Norm Koger, The Operational Art of War (Players guide, Talonsoft, Inc., MD, 1997), 5.
2References available from The Operational Art of War home page at http://home.austin.rr.com/normkoger/toaw1.html; Internet.
3Koger, 12.
4Ibid.
5Ibid., 13.
6Ibid.
7Ibid.
8Ibid.
9Norm Koger, electronic interview by author, personal notes, Ft. Leavenworth, KS., 12 October 2000, 5.
10Ibid., 5.
11Koger, “Operational Art of War,” 14.
12Koger, interview, 4.
13Koger, “Operational Art of War,” 27.
14Ibid., 12.
15Koger, interview, 12 October 2000, 4.
16Ibid., 3.
17Ibid.
18References available from The Operational Art of War [home page] available from http://home.austin.rr.com/normkoger/toaw1.html; Internet.
19References available from Wargamer Magazine [home page] available from http://wargamer.com/reviews/operational_art_of_war_review.asp; Internet.
