RE: Initiative - was RE: Piquet

I think it's interesting that we all accept random die
rolls coupled with  modifiers as a good way to resolve
fire combat and morale, but many of us balk at using
the same method to simulate command and control
issues.

It's understood that a 30% chance of getting a "hit"
on an enemy unit doesn't mean your unit only shoots a
single round and that round only has a 30% chance of
hitting, but rather the cumulative effect of your
unit's fire has a 30% chance of effecting the enemy.

So, the single die roll is not literally the action,
but rather is combined with modifiers to provide a
representation of the overall effect of many actions,
decisions, and conditions. 

Granted, in PK the modifiers are a bit unorthodox (#
of "infantry move in open" cards... vs. the standard
+1 to hit at close range), but I think the principle
is the same. Modifiers + randomness simulate reality
in a fairly predictable but not guaranteed way. (No
one in their right mind is going to charge an SD with
a lone DD, but how many times have we all rolled
nothing but 1's with the SD and the DD's gotten clean
away?)

-Adrian

--- B Lin <lin@rxkinetix.com> wrote:

> 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 
> 
=== message truncated ===

		
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