"Military and Martial Plane" Author: XY156
August 1990 , US President Bush Sr. scratched his head bald.
In the early morning of August 2, Iraqi suddenly dispatched 100,000 troops to launch a lightning offensive against neighboring Kuwait . Obviously, Kuwait cannot stop the Iraqi army. So will Iraq cross the border to attack Saudi after capturing Kuwait? Is the Iraqi army's combat target Kuwait or Saudi Arabia? No one knows.
If the US military wants to predict the future trends of the Iraqi army, it must conduct an war chess deduction , but the Ministry of National Defense's combat simulation system is too large and the preparation time is too long. After the simulation is completed, the Iraqi army may have had supper in the Saudi capital Riyadh .
In desperation, a staff officer slapped his head and thought of the popular war chess board game at that time - "Gulf Strike". The US military began to use Gulf Strike to promote the military at 3 pm. By the time the performance was performed in the evening, the Iraqi army had occupied the entire territory of Kuwait.
▲ "Gulf Strike" was a very popular war chess board game on the market at that time
, but the result of the deduction made Bush breathe a sigh of relief. The results show that the Iraqi army will not directly attack Saudi Arabia, and if the US military sends troops from Saudi airports and ports, it will completely defeat the Iraqi army back to the womb. Sure enough, the development of the situation is consistent with the results of the board gamers' push.
predicts the war result with a board game, which is the first time to make a fortune in the world, and since then, war games have become famous in the United States.
But you may not believe it. Such a powerful thing can be traced back to the daily entertainment of old men on the street.
So the question is: What exactly is a war chess game?
The war game in a broad sense actually refers to a "battle simulation game". The reason why "battle" is used instead of "war" is because "war" involves many aspects such as diplomacy and internal affairs, while "battle" focuses more on the battlefield.
The constituent elements of the war game are a simulated battlefield map, several simulated soldiers’ chess pieces and certain rules. The purpose of this type of game is to abstractly simulate the confrontation between the two armies on the real battlefield, which tests the player’s ability to dispatch troops.
What game do you think of? That's right, Go and chess are actually the oldest war games in a broad sense. However, compared with the complexity of the real battlefield, Go and chess are still too abstract. So in the 19th century, military chess in the modern sense was born in Prussia in Europe.
In modern wars, war games have played a decisive factor in the success or failure of wars countless times. For example, in the French battlefield of World War II , against the Maginot Defense Line built by France, the famous German general Manstein proposed to insert it directly from the Arden Mountain Area between the French heavy army group and the Maginot defense line, and surrounded and annihilate the French army. After the plan for
was proposed, the German army was also in an uproar because the German armored soldiers had never conducted such a risky large-scale assault.
Since that's the case, then use war chess to deduce it. In early 1940, the German General Staff of conducted a military push, and the result was that Manstein's plan was completely feasible. So Manstein successfully persuaded the German General Staff to launch the French Battle from the Ardennes area and defeated France in one fell swoop, leaving us with endless jokes of insulting the French.
has the positive textbook, but are there any negative textbooks? Yes, in Japan.
On May 1, 1942, in order to test the feasibility of the plan to seize Midway Island, Japanese Joint Fleet conducted a 4-day wargame deduction. In this wargame deduction, Yu Hengchan, Chief of Staff of the Sino-Japanese Joint Fleet, served as the referee and also served as the commander of the Japanese military.
In the first deduction, the US B17 bomber hit three main aircraft carriers as many as 49 times. Akagi and Kaga were hit and sunk, the Feilong was seriously injured, and the Japanese army was defeated.
However, Yu Hengchan was unwilling to accept such deduction results and forcibly modified the attack capabilities of the US bomber , and in the end, only the Kaga was sunk. When it was time to simulate the subsequent island war, Yu Hengchan directly overturned the previous result of the Kaga being sunk, allowing Kaga to "resurrect" and participate in the battle, and finally won the battle.
▲Forcibly modified the result, and the push was equivalent to not pushing
However, the war is very fair and will not be transferred with the subjective will of a commander. The Midway Navy is almost the replay of the first military push. All four Japanese aircraft carriers were sunk, and Japanese Navy was in a slump and declining.
Soldier push is like this. If you ignore his existence, he will watch you fail. If you take him seriously, he will help you to win.
From ancient Go and chess to modern military chess, war chess deduction has become more and more professional and complex, and its difficulty has gradually surpassed the ability of ordinary military enthusiasts to bear.
So for us military fans, is there a battle simulation game that can satisfy our pleasure of "dials and silences and oars are destroyed while chatting and laughing"? Under this demand, military chess board games emerged.
It is no exaggeration to say that the electronic battle simulation games that are well-known today all originated from this kind of war chess board game.
The 1980s was the golden age of war games board games.
The most classic one is "UP FRONT" (UF for short), which is a World War II simulation board game where players command a team of soldiers to perform combat missions. In order to break the previous gameplay of talking about war on paper on board games, the designer interviewed many World War II veterans and tried his best to immerse the elements of war into the game.
Many readers may have played a game called " Allied Suicides ". In the 1980s, there was also a board game called "Advanced Infantry Squad Leader", which has the flavor of Allied Suicides.
"Advanced Infantry Squad Leader", players need to combine terrain rules and use them reasonably. The player's team needs to complete tasks with various weapons in various situations, which is very subtle and can be said to be the ultimate of tactical war games.
html There are many masterpieces of war games in the 380s. In addition to "UF" and "Advanced Infantry Squad Leader", there are also "Civil War" published in 1983 and "Samurai Sword" published in 1986, which have been passed down for decades. Those genius war chess designers made military enthusiasts enjoy the war on the eve of the arrival of their personal computers.
However, traditional war games are also limited. Although war games have been increasingly able to provide players with realistic battlefield experience after generations of genius war games, due to the objective constraints of war games themselves as board games, many elements of real battlefields are difficult to reproduce in traditional war games.
For example, immediacy on the real battlefield. After all, the real battlefield is not a chessboard. The deduction of your turn and my turn is inevitably a bit out of the way. Especially when fighting at the level of encounters, facing the battle reports flying like snowflakes, how to deal with them is often just a moment.
Another example is the fog of war. "The Mist of War" was first proposed by the Prussian military strategist Clausewitz . He proposed in "On War" that three-quarters of the factors of military operations are hidden in the fog, in order to emphasize the importance of reconnaissance. Traditional war chess often use "chess piece secret buttons" and other methods to simulate the fog of war, but even so, the opponent can still see the movements of their own troops, and the significance of reconnaissance is greatly reduced.
Moreover, the rules of desktop war games are really complicated. In order to simulate the real battlefield, many parameters that can be automatically calculated through computers today. In traditional war games, you often have to memorize a whole rule book. For many non-hardcore historical cosplay enthusiasts, it is really daunting.
Is there a battle simulation game that can not only satisfy the wishes of players to cosplay historical generals, but also break through the various limitations of traditional war games? With the popularity of home computers, real-time strategy games emerged.
mentioned the real-time strategy game. Compared to many friends, they have recalled the wonderful time when they were studying, playing Joan of Arc expelling the British, or they can't help but shout EnTaroTassadar.
Of course, traditional RTS games like " Age of Empires " usually involve resource collection, army training and other operations, which are still a bit different from the battle simulation games we talked about. Due to popularization, this type of game has also made certain sacrifices to the level of imitation of the battlefield.
In order to make up for the shortcomings of hardcore battle simulation game players, CA Studio's " Total War " series simplifies other operations and refocuses on the battlefield, while also making the military more exquisite. To some extent, I would like to call the Total War series the "complete body" of the "battle simulation game" in the RTS era.
In fact, real-time strategy games like the "Total War" series are a breakthrough in the battle simulation games on the computer. To some extent, I would like to call the Total War series the "complete body" of the "battle simulation game" in the RTS era.
First of all, the "real-time" comparison of real-time strategy games is the tabletop game. Due to the board game form, board game battle simulation games are turn-based and require continuous throwing of colors, which is not conducive to the immersive game experience. The real-time strategy game operation is real-time, and the essence of military push is to pursue "reality". After all, no real battle is completed by you step by step.
At the same time, the computer allows players to no longer be restricted by time and location. As long as they want to play, they can fight with friends thousands of miles away anytime and anywhere.
From Go, chess, to desktop war games, and then to electronic real-time strategy games, we can see that with the development of technology and battle simulation games, we are constantly innovating, step by step in the real battlefield in the minds of players.
Compared with Go and chess, desktop wargame games are derived from military wargame, and their complexity and realism have greatly increased. Compared with desktop wargame games, electronic real-time strategy games have broken through the difficulty of "immediateness", and a large number of game parameters can also be internalized into system background calculations, which greatly lowers the threshold.
We might as well imagine what other breakthroughs will be achieved in the future battle simulation games? I think the next breakthrough point may be "people".
War is a science about "people". The outcome of a battle not only depends on drawing lines on the map, but also closely related to the morale of the troops and the initiative of the battlefield. It is also a trick to encircle the enemy. Some troops can eat dumplings at a time, while others have superficial "event-to-earth" but are actually defeated one by one. The key is "people".
Can the development of technology make the battle simulation game break through the difficulty of "people"? I think some of the current multiplayer online strategy games can provide some new ideas. In this regard, the recent "Dragon and Tiger Championship" of " Three Kingdoms·Strategic Edition " (referred to as the Three Battles) may be used as a reference.
is similar to war chess games. The "Dragon and Tiger Championship" is based on the fourth Northern Expedition of Zhuge Liang in history, greatly simplifying the economic operation and diplomatic alliance, and focusing highly on the deployment of troops on the battlefield.There is only one goal for the game: to get higher war scores in just 90 minutes, or to directly capture the enemy's base camp.
But unlike traditional war games, there are 150 players on both sides of the game, and each player represents several troops in the army. These players will accumulate and affect the balance of the war in every local battle.
In one of the games I observed, this kind of "human" element was fully demonstrated. In this game, Zhuge Jun and Sima Jun's command team adopted completely different strategies. Zhuge Army only deployed a small number of troops in the east and west routes, and concentrated its forces to go straight to the middle route; while Sima Army chose to fight steadily and advance in three routes.
From a military perspective, there is no distinction between these two ideas. The Zhuge Army's concentration of troops directly into the middle route obviously helped him to gain strategic initiative at the beginning and control the city with a very strategic significance in the center of the battlefield, but it also exposed the emptiness of both wings. The Sima Army chose to fight steadily, which was in line with the "Sun Tzu's Art of War": "First be invincible, and wait for the enemy to win."
Therefore, the key to the battle situation is whether the Sima army can balance the power with the Zhuge army at several strongholds in the middle with less troops and wait for an opportunity to attack the two wings of the Zhuge army.
In local battles, the influence that the command layer on both sides can exert is actually limited. There are many strongholds on the battlefield, and the battlefield changes rapidly. The command layer cannot conduct micro-operation commands on 150 players one by one. In real history, jokes like "air pitching handwriting" and "front-line machine guns move left by five meters" will also suffer a great loss in the game.
In this situation, the subjective initiative and adaptability of every ordinary player are tested.
This is actually reflected in all aspects of the battlefield. You can observe in the game that the battle for a stronghold is not simply "Brothers, come with me". Some troops will first clear the enemy troops near the stronghold, some troops will directly bypass the stronghold and go forward, defend and block the enemy's reinforcements based on the dangerous situation, and some troops are specifically responsible for siege and attacking the city. This is quite a bit like a "Ping An County Battle".
The cooperation between players and players, and troops often determines who will eventually fall into this stronghold.
Even in every specific encounter, you can see some very "fine" operations. For example, if you predict that the other party will inevitably send a large number of cavalry to attack lightly, you will send a targeted delivery of slow speed, but you will just restrain the other party's spearmen. For example, through the combination of military generals and the configuration of tactics, on the battlefield, we often defeat the more with fewer and the stronger with weaker.
For example, in the battle for a stronghold, which troops conduct attacks, which troops conduct aid, which troops conduct ambush and intercept, etc.
Judging from the results of the battle situation, Sima Jun’s players obviously completed the mission excellently. Not only did Zhuge Jun not take advantage of the middle, he was vaguely at a disadvantage in the competition for strongholds. After Sima Jun gained a foothold in the middle, he decisively launched an attack on the west, which caused Zhuge Jun to be in chaos and led to the collapse of the middle.
I originally thought that Zhuge Jun would "play" like this, but I didn't expect that when Sima Jun was in a heavy army, a small army suddenly appeared in Zhuge Jun, secretly bypassing the battlefield and trying to take down the Sima Jun's rear stronghold. Although this operation was discovered and strangled in the cradle by Sima Jun, I think it is of great significance to the evolution of war games.
This small force must not have been an attack spontaneously carried out by the commander, because the scale is very small, and this must have been a spontaneous attack by some players trying to change the battlefield situation. Although it ended in failure, the subjective initiative that these players burst out on the 300-person battlefield is the most inconspicuous and the biggest highlight of this game.
▲Several players sneaked into the rear, which is called subjective initiative
War is a science about people. What kind of adaptability will people burst out in war adversity? This "small-scale assault" may provide an answer for the development of the battle simulation game.
Will multiplayer online games become the future of "battle simulation games"? I think this is still to be examined. Perhaps in the future, we can experience the fun of this "multiplay campaign simulation" in more and more themes.
From the oldest chess and go, to later war games board games, to electronic real-time strategy games, to multiplayer battle simulation games, "war games" has experienced thousands of years of development and evolution. However, no matter how change is, its essence and pursuit have never changed: that is, in their respective fields, the reality of the battlefield is simulated!
