Document created: 21 February 01
Published Aerospace Power Journal - Spring  2001

The Operational Art of War: Century of Warfare. CD-ROM. TalonSoft (http://www.talonsoft. com), P.O. Box 632, Forest Hills, Maryland 21050, 1998–2000, $39.95. Minimum system requirements: Pentium 133 or higher, Windows 95/98, 16-bit High Color or SVGA graphics, 16 MB RAM (32 MB recommended), 4X CD-ROM drive, Microsoft-compatible mouse, Windows-compatible sound card.

Century of Warfare is the latest and most complete installment in a game series that began in 1998 with The Operational Art of War, Volume 1, 1939–1955, followed by several revisions and expansions. Volume 2, Modern Battles, carries the series up to the present. Century of Warfare further expands it with updates and scenarios covering World War I and the early twentieth century. I believe that this CD represents the finest example of commercial war gaming yet produced. Despite its faults, it provides the best mix of playability and serious simulation yet seen in a computer war game. Others who grew up playing the board games of now-defunct companies such as Simulations Publications, Inc. (SPI) and Avalon Hill will probably agree. To understand why this is so, we must examine the game’s origins.

Back in the heyday of board war gaming, there were whole families of campaign-level games, ranging from simple-but-fun titles that could be played in an afternoon, like Jim Dunnigan’s France 1940 (Avalon Hill, 1972), to pedantic monsters that could run a week to a turn, like Rich Berg’s Campaign for North Africa (SPI, 1979). One found both great variety and great challenge—much to enjoy as both a game player and a historian. Then the paper-and-cardboard war-gaming industry died in the mid-eighties, killed by a combination of hostile takeovers, corporate mismanagement, and competition from the growing computer-gaming industry. A long hiatus followed, during which serious war gamers either fell back on old titles or drifted off into adventure-strategy computer games. Times were fairly lean until the mid-nineties, when a crowd of true war-game titles exploded onto the scene. The flash point of this explosion was Panzer General (Strategic Simulations, Inc. [SSI], 1995), which combined a remarkably intuitive user interface with a game engine that had enough depth and "chrome" to attract even serious war gamers. Although several levels of abstraction away from a real model of warfare, it made players confront many of the choices actually faced by campaign commanders. It was so good at this, in fact, that Air Command and Staff College (ACSC) actually experimented with using a version of it (Pacific General) as a teaching tool in campaign-level planning.

Beyond this, the game was fun. It provoked a reaction within the gaming community akin to that of Jim Dunnigan’s Panzer Blitz (Avalon Hill, 1970), whose popularity back in the early seventies helped create much of today’s grognard community (a term that means "grumbler," formerly applied by Napoléon to his Old Guard and currently to hard-core war gamers), and John Hill’s Squad Leader (Avalon Hill, 1977), which helped fuel the great board-war-game boom of the late seventies. The war-gaming hobby seems to need a fun, accessible hit every so often to attract new players, a few of whom eventually become interested in deeper simulations. Boiled down and rendered, they become grognards.

A number of excellent war-game series appeared in the year or so following the release of Panzer General. The renaissance was short-lived, however, as the large companies realized that demand for true war games came from a relatively small (if somewhat fanatical) community. Still, as the wave of war-game popularity washed over the industry, many tide pools of serious game development formed, a number of which remain today. One of these is TalonSoft, which offers The Operational Art of War (TOAW), the finest attempt yet seen at building a serious model of warfare in a playable format. Creator Norm Kroger, formerly with SSI, is known for his innovative designs and attention to detail. The two titles he produced prior to TOAW—Tanks! and Age of Rifles—are among the finest tactical simulations available. Many people have contributed scenarios or developmental aid to the TOAW system, including ACSC’s Matt Caffrey and Chuck Kamps.

All TOAW games look like conventional board war games: a "God’s-eye view" of a hex-based map grid, with unit counters (small squares) containing standard NATO functional symbols surrounded by status information. The player interacts with units and the game engine, either by directly clicking on unit counters or selecting from a variety of available menus. There is nothing remarkable here although the terrain presentation is more attractive than in most such games. (There is a cheesy attempt at rendering a three-dimensional play area, but most gamers will stick with the better-presented two-dimensional display.) The rule book, thorough and well laid out, contains a wealth of reference material for scenario developers, who will find the game a rich source of enjoyment.

Military historians and gamers who have the time to research and build scenarios will find this game a treasure. Actually, the game could best be called a scenario-building engine for modern campaign-level combat, with a number of finished scenarios attached, much like Age of Rifles and Tanks! The game system is flexible enough to cover scales from 2.5 km to 50 km per hex, game turns ranging from six hours to a week, and unit sizes ranging from companies to corps. The Century of Warfare edition comes with close to one hundred scenarios, and about two hundred more are available on the Web in various war-game-site scenario archives. (See, for example, www.wargamer.com/archive.) Many of these are as good as or better than those released commercially.

The game system carries forward a number of innovations introduced by Kroger in earlier SSI games, but their combined effect is something of a revolutionary departure. The first of these is the game’s interface, which is remarkably intuitive. In fact, it’s a model of its kind. Almost all of the tedious unit-status bookkeeping that plagued serious operational-level board games of yore is transparent to the player, yet all of the detail is available at the push of a menu button (usually to several levels of detail beyond anything the player can use).

Also innovative are the game’s movement and combat system. The game is turn-based, but within a given player’s turn, movement and combat are almost seamless. A player may instruct his or her moving units to conduct combat at any point by ordering them into enemy-occupied hexes. If the opposing units are much weaker, they are simply overrun. If they are strong enough, they force a prepared battle, and a combat menu appears, allowing the player to plan attacks, including nearby maneuver units and fire support, if available. The combat-resolution system calculates how much of the attacking units’ movement allowances has been spent and allows movement after combat if sufficient capability remains. Higher-quality and better-supplied forces are better able to use this type of movement. Additionally, units may be forced to fight when attempting to disengage from the enemy, and only the largest or most mobile forces can do so with impunity. Thus, players must carefully sequence their movement and attacks to achieve significant breakthroughs. There is a random element here too, so players are never completely certain when their turns will end. This is an elegant system, and the practical effect is to make blitzkrieg-type exploitation possible, even if other game features work against this potential.

The game’s logistics model constitutes yet another innovation. The system forces players to deal intimately and intelligently with their lines of communication and supply states if they wish their units to retain any significant combat power. This is the correct focus for an operational-level game—the soul of surface warfare at this level is logistics, and no game has yet modeled it better.

The system’s artificial intelligence (AI) routines are among the most sophisticated in war gaming. Players expecting the easily mastered AI logic trails of other games will be unpleasantly surprised (and probably defeated). Kroger has somehow managed to model Auftragstaktik fairly effectively, as long as nothing more is required of the virtual general than the taking or holding of geographical objectives. The AI cannot play Gen Vo Nguyen Giap, but it’s more challenging than real Soviets, Iraqis, or other inflexible opponents might have been.

A final significant innovation is the event engine, which allows scenario designers to introduce external factors affecting a campaign. It can be used, for example, to control the participation of forces if certain conditions are met (e.g., Chinese intervention in Korea if the United States pushes too far), to introduce political constraints and restraints upon the players, or simply to convey news. Designers can attach probabilities that events will happen, adding a satisfying degree of uncertainty to historical campaigns.

All of these features add up to a remarkable simulation, but the game system has its shortcomings. Early editions contained peculiar unit valuations that led to consistently unrealistic results. Many of these problems have been fixed—Kroger seems to update the unit database about once a year. Even so, the problems point out one of the major limitations of the scenario-building function: designers cannot edit unit values or create their own new units within the force database. This is particularly frustrating to anyone interested in accurately gaming airpower within TOAW since much of the air-unit data is grossly in error.

Another problem is that units incur significant, often mobility-crippling, penalties for moving near enemy units. It’s possible to run through them if your units are big and mobile enough, but even without considering disengagement combat, it is very difficult to move around the enemy. This works against other game features, making true (and historically accurate) breakthroughs and exploitations almost impossible. Century of Warfare is better than earlier versions of the game in this respect, but the problem is still not fixed. It may be that unit zones of control are "stickier" than they should be, or the problem may lie in the fact that the psychological effects of combat are not modeled well. Unit "readiness" and "morale" levels reflect the effects of fatigue and loss of supply with fair accuracy, but the more profound effects of shock and dislocation are not present. The game system includes a "shock value," which is associated with a player’s entire force and which confers advantages upon the attacker (if his shock value is higher than the enemy’s). Its effect is not strong enough, however. True historical breakthroughs, in which the defender is shocked into inaction or headlong flight, are almost impossible to achieve. There is no Kaiserschlact, no true blitzkrieg, no O’Conner in the desert, no MacArthur after Inchon, and no Desert Storm in TOAW’s art of war. Kroger has modeled shock effects before, at the tactical level in Age of Rifles, for instance, but has not included them (or at least not enough of them) in TOAW. The psychological effects of shock and dislocation are just as profound at the operational level as they are on the battlefield.

A corollary of this problem is that command and control (C²) are not well modeled. Headquarters units exist, but their function is to bolster resupply and help coordinate combat. The effect is to make even the most doctrinally rigid armies practice Auftragstaktik as well as the Israelis or World War II Germans. This is patently unrealistic and makes simulation of rigidly commanded armies, like those of the Arabs or Warsaw Pact, difficult to simulate. According to the scenario design notes, command structures can be made more fragile, but this hasn’t been implemented in many published scenarios. This may simply reflect a lack of understanding on the part of scenario designers and not a structural game flaw.

All of this leads up to the game system’s biggest problem. Airpower is the dominant arm in modern warfare. The airplane, not the tank, is today’s primary means of inducing shock and dislocation within an enemy army. Airpower can also induce these effects theaterwide, not just on the immediate battlefield. Yet, in TOAW, airpower is portrayed as nothing more than flying artillery. In the game, players manage airpower with a menu that allows them to apportion air units to air superiority, interdiction, or close air support (CAS) missions. The CAS and interdiction rules work fairly well, as far as they go, but the game system fails to show some of airpower’s most important contributions to the operational art. Firstly, airpower cannot impose shock/dislocation effects, since these are not modeled. (An "air shock value" exists but applies only to combat with other air units.) Secondly, airpower cannot interdict supply or C², one of the main uses of this type of mission in the "real world." In short, because airpower cannot be used to "isolate the battlefield," it is impossible to accurately game AirLand Battle doctrine in NATO– Warsaw Pact scenarios. Thirdly, air cannot attack fixed targets of high value other than bridges. It would be nice to be able to use tactical air forces to tear up railroads and interdict German armor in late World War II scenarios, but the game doesn’t allow this.

Apportioning air assets doesn’t accurately reflect air’s contribution in this game any more than it does in the real joint air-tasking process. Modern aircraft (and, in larger scenarios, even the earliest aircraft) can fly all of the apportioned missions within the scope of a single game turn, but there is no way to portray this in TOAW. Reconnaissance is vital to game play, but even this aspect of airpower is not modeled well. Ground units in contact reveal enemy dispositions, but players can fly their airplanes over the enemy until kingdom come, striking deep targets, and these sorties will not uncover enemy units. A "theater recon level" makes up for some of this but is usually set too low in published scenarios. Once again, these may be conceptual—not structural—problems. More "air-minded" scenario developers may be able to coax more accurate results from the game system. Still, it is revealing that the monster Desert Storm scenario begins at the start of the ground campaign, tacitly conceding defeat in modeling airpower and leaving well over half the Desert Storm story untold.

In short, TOAW is a serious, brilliantly innovative simulation—one that every serious war gamer and student of war should own. It will provide countless hours of enjoyable play and may, with improvements to the system, become an invaluable tool for speculative research. It is unfortunate that the game pre-sents a classic "groundcentric" perspective of war, leaving a great deal of the true "operational art of war" unrevealed. It would be gratifying to see TOAW incorporate accurate treatment of shock/dislocation and airpower, since these are two of the most pivotal phenomena in this "century of warfare."

Lt Col J. P. Hunerwadel, USAF
Laughlin AFB, Texas

Disclaimer

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.