Mechanics Lab: Global Warfare

I am at heart a skirmish wargamer. I blame Mordheim battle reports in White Dwarf that I read as a kid and probably Games Workshop in general, since I suppose all of their games even Apocalypse are skirmish games in the classic wargaming definition of skirmish (1 figure = 1 man). Having never played a game on a larger scale than that other than Risk, let’s just say my experience is lacking.

So how do you fight a war on a global scale?

I once heard someone say (I can’t remember who, where or when) that a war is more about logistics than fighting. If you can continue to supply the front lines with men and munitions you will win.

Bearing that in mind as a game designer I’m thinking about modelling 4 Ps. The goal being to get some sense of the decisions top commanders would have to make in a war without things getting too out of hand and unmanageable. So the 4 Ps:

People – Simple enough. You’ll be needing people to do pretty much everything in your war, and for my purposes the Jendari Collective and House Baronor are not technologically advanced enough that they wouldn’t have to rely on people. Things may be different for the Allegiance of Gnossos.

Production – If a tank is destroyed it’s not too much of an issue if you can shortly replace it with two new ones. One of the major reasons the Axis powers lost WW2 is they were having to compete with both American and Soviet manufacturing. Which became extremely difficult once all of their factories were getting bombed.

Power – Power for me is kind of a nebulous thing since I don’t know how the different factions within the Deathzap universe power their things, whether that is by using fossil fuels, electricity, nuclear power or something else, whatever they use power is undoubtedly a huge factor. Again once the Germans were struggling for fuel their days were numbered.

Propaganda – This is debatable, and whether it is as important as the other three I’m not sure, but propaganda is a big influence on your side’s morale in a war. If you’re capable of turning some portion of your population into fanatics for your cause that is a big help. If the people think they’re winning the war they’re far more likely to keep fighting.

Diplomacy should be a big factor, but I’m assuming that all diplomacy has already broken down, however once the war starts to wrap up diplomacy may be key in ending it sooner as one side begins considering surrender. Also I couldn’t think of a ‘P’ for diplomacy.

So how do those Ps translate to mechanics for a game?

In short I don’t know.

I’m partially torn between using my world map to track the campaign and play games on a table and just playing out the entire campaign on the map as a wargame in and of itself, then maybe later re-fighting some big battles, or smaller actions within larger battles just for fun. The first option means a much simpler system but the second opens up room for more detail, and would allow me to generate more of Deathzap’s history in a much shorter space of time. That’s really appealing for me.

Going down the second route there are some questions that need answering:

Time scale – How long is a turn in a global wargame? For skirmish games you’re talking seconds elapsed each turn. For a game like Risk a turn is probably near a year or even more, since each turn in Risk is essentially an entire war. Deathzap has a level of technology hundreds of years in advance of your average game of Risk, so I can only assume that means your average turn is faster than a year as troops can be mobilised much faster and weapons are far deadlier.

The other question in regards to time scale is calendar. Since the population of the planet Jendar don’t speak even English it is unlikely that they’ll be using the same calendar. January, February etc. will have to be replaced, this also raises questions of the planet’s orbit around the star Xol. How long is a year? How many months are there? If a turn is a week how many weeks to a year? Even how many days fit into a week? What are the names of the days and months? Who or what are they named after and why? That’s a bit of world building I’ll certainly enjoy.

Energy and Production – Within the Jendari Collective and House Baronor which nations are responsible or simply best at manufacturing arms and producing energy? Who has the best natural resources? I know within the Collective Dabra has traditionally been the place to go for oil, but that’s about it. Considering this could have a huge impact on the war as those are two factors I’m planning on modelling I’ll have to carefully consider the locations of those nations or the war could be very one sided and over rather quickly.

Deathzap – Deathzap itself has unique considerations that haven’t been part of any historical war, and that makes things difficult to logically figure out. Starships are used to move corps around, which means troops can appear almost anywhere at anytime. Additionally the Heaven’s Peace Accord which was signed by both House Baronor and the Jendari Collective forbids starship combat within certain distances of planets. A starship crash recently ended the Camerian Civil war which sparked the now global war, so I think it’s unlikely either side will want to violate the Accord unless desperate. Violating the Accord would also affect any future relationship the victor might have with the Allegiance of Gnossos, League of Zandor and Legion of Kharthion which will be crucial in the aftermath. This does however create a war with essentially no front lines. That will take some mulling over I think.

I assume any nation would split its forces between those mounted in starships and ground defence forces, but considering starship troopers could be dropped anywhere at anytime it’s likely that the ground defence forces would be much larger since they would have to cover such a huge area? Or does it lead to guerilla tactics? Hundreds of miles of minefields?

There’s a lot of questions to answer!

This week I have also been painting some of those bigger figures featured a while ago, I have since returned to my local B&M to pick more up, but they’ve been sold out since:

They’re painted as Volkovian Star Navy by the way.

They’re big enough that I even picked out the eyes: