RE: Initiative - was RE: Piquet

Allan,
	Some of your examples support the points of where Piquet fails
in the initative department:

1) Howard was a known negative factor and Hooker attempted to compensate
by moving Reynolds to cover the flank, in Piquet you have no idea which
units you are going to be able to move until you get some initative
points to do something.  You can not compensate for a known break in the
command, because there is no fore knowledge of the weak points in your
command structure.  When you do send orders to any unit, they will
execute your orders, not 1-3 turns from now, but this turn.

2)  Hooker made a rapid decision to reinforce Howard's flank - the
decision was made and the orders issued.  But Reynolds did not receive
the appropriate information (orders) until it was too late.  Again, the
decision for action was made quickly, but the reception of those orders
lagged.  I'm sure Reynolds did not sit on the orders for hours after
receiving them, but executed as soon as was possible.

3) Hooker ordered Sedgwick to take Lee in the rear, again he made the
decision quickly but as you pointed out, he did not emphasize speed
enough and Sedgwick was a day late.  If Sedgwick had understood Hooker's
emphasis, perhaps he might have moved faster - again it is an issue of
complete information in a timely manner.

There is a difference between a known problem and a known possibility of
a problem.  For instance a rifle that jams 10% of the time in a
firefight and taking a couple of minutes to unjam is different than
having 10% of your rifles out of action due to manufacturing problems. 
In the first case, you might have 100 rifles with the overall effect
being that you get 90% of rated firepower, in the second case you field
90 rifles out of a possible 100 so you get 90% rated firepower.  It
appears the same, until you are the guy at the sharp end of the stick. 
Would you have more confidence in a firearm that jams 10% of the time or
one that jams rarely?  If you know 10% of your rifles are sidelined, you
can take steps to alleviate or bypass the problem - perhaps of the 10
sidelined you can scrounge enough parts to make a few more work, perhaps
knowing that 10% of rifles orderded are defective so you increase your
order by 10% to compensate.  If the rifles just jam randomly, then your!
  guys are just screwed in a firefight they have to take their chances.

So at a company level it appears that there is no difference - whether
the problem is random statistical chance or a delineated subset of the
whole, but in practice it makes a world of difference.	Piquet's
initiative is another example.	It generates results similar to
historical results, but how it does it doesn't necessarily correlate
with how those results were achieved in the historical example.  In
Piquet, a unit may sit and do nothing because you don't have enough
action points, which is very different than a unit that doesn't move
because it never received its orders or it's commander is ignoring
orders.  In Piquet, if you get initative points, you can move any unit
you want to.  In historical battles, you have stubborn commanders who
will subvert, delay or plain ignore your orders and will not move under
any circumstances or will move in a manner contrary to your orders.

Ideally an initative system would be moot, because the individiual unit
actions will generate "initiative".  If you give the orders and they are
all carried out, then you have the "initative".  If you give orders and
they aren't carried out, then you don't have the initiative.  Factors
such as communication speed and clarity should also play a role in
determining those effects.

--Binhan


-----Original Message-----
From: Allan Goodall [mailto:agoodall@worldnet.att.net]
Sent: Wednesday, September 29, 2004 7:55 AM
To: gzg-l@scotch.csua.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: Initiative - was RE: Piquet 

On 28 Sep 2004 at 20:26, The GZG Digest wrote:

> From: "B Lin" <lin@rxkinetix.com>
> 
> These errors occurred, not because the general was slow in giving the
> order after the appropriate infomation was available, but is almost
> always due to incomplete information being available to the general in
> a timely fashion. 

My area of expertise is the American Civil War, and I take exception to 
this. Yes, knowledge of the battle conditions was a major factor in most

(if not all) battles of the ACW. Command initiative was _the_ deciding 
factor in many of the major battles of the ACW. Actually, the initiative

of the _sub-commanders_ were the deciding factors in many of the major 
battles. 

A good example is Chancellorsville. Hooker told Howard to watch his
right 
flank, but Howard did not take the appropriate measures. Hooker didn't 
know that Jackson was planning to assault his flank, but it was a 
definite possibility. Hooker issued the appropriate orders, but his sub-
commander ignored them. Hooker went a step further. He issued orders for

Reynold's corps to move up beside Howard the night before, at about the 
same time Jackson and Lee were devising their plan. For some reason that

was never discovered, it took the dispatch rider 3 hours to travel 5 
miles. Reynolds got the order just before sunrise. By the time his men 
were moving, the sun was up and the Confederates on Marye's Heights
could 
bombard the bridge across the Rappahannock. This delayed Reynolds by a 
couple more hours. As a result, Jackson rolled up the Eleventh Corps 
while Reynolds was en route. 

Hooker told Sedgwick to march from Fredericksburg to Lee's rear as fast 
as possible, but gave Sedgwick too much discretion in his orders.
Instead 
of Sedgwick's corps hitting Lee in the rear on the third day of the 
battle, Sedgwick struck a day later, when a groggy Hooker had already 
moved the army across the Rappahannock. (There are several other
examples 
in this battle, but you get the idea.)

Another example is Gettysburg, where Lee wanted Ewell to attack Cemetery

Hill on July 1, but Ewell didn't (claiming his troops were too tired).
On 
July 2 he pushed Longstreet into attacking the Union left flank, but 
Longstreet was slow to respond. On July 3, Lee wanted Ewell to 
demonstrate against the Union right while Longstreet's Assault (better, 
but less accurately, known as Pickett's Charge) went on in the centre, 
but Ewell attacked too soon.

In each of these cases, the correct order was issued (though you could 
debate the effect Ewell would have had on July 1 at Gettysburg) but the 
battle was lost due to the time it took the order to be received, or due

to the lack of initiative on the part of the sub-commanders.

One thing I really like about Piquet is that it takes away some of the 
player's abilities of co-ordination offered to him by the God's Eye View

and because the player is not actually on the battlefield. Incompetent 
commanders and a clumsy command structure can be more easily simulated
in 
Piquet than in most other games. I'm on the (mostly silent) playtest
list 
for the Piquet naval game. In the Russo-Japanese War, at the battle of 
the Yellow Sea, one of the Russian ships (I think it was the 
Petropavlovsk, but I have a bad memory for Russian ship names) was
struck 
in the bridge and had a rudder jam. Unfortunately, it was also leading a

column at the time. It slipped into a turn, with the ships immediately 
behind it following along. This was the turning point of the battle.
This 
is something very, very few naval wargames simulate. In almost every
case 
a player would know enough to ignore the lead ship. Piquet offers the 
possibility of this situation happening.

Piquet is not for everyone, as mentioned before. I don't find it better 
than other games, just different. When I play it, I play it for those 
differences.

 ---

Allan Goodall	    http://www.hyperbear.com
agoodall@att.net   agoodall@hyperbear.com

"The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time." - Bertrand Russell