"How long is a turn" Topic

and more to the point when you wrote the rules, why did you make it that long; no B/S answers about variable delay either.

I'm asking because I suspect that generally the answer is too short and the reason that I say this that by it's very nature the length of a turn is the gap between us seeing something and making a command decision response. So I'm thinking 'how long would the real general represented by me on the table really take to spot something, issue a new order, get that order transmitted to the troops. I did some simplistic maths for a Napoleonic divisional general and came up with 7.5-10 minutes. Translate that to table top movement rules and suddenly troops go a long way in one turn, which means you don't get to micro-manage their movement.

Thoughts

A very complicated answer since I have seen rules with 3 second turns, a horribly slow WW2 skirmish set, to a quarter in board games.

My first set of rules for miniatures, I spent hours, I was in the army, over several weeks at the parade ground watching troops practice marching. How long it took to make various maneuvers. I even got to watch the Division Horse Platoon practice moves and even a charge from one end to another. One result was that I concluded that the turn was too short for the amount of time needed to complete a cited function as written by a popular designer at that time..

Later rules I used the turn length in regards to a unit being able to complete a function.

One of the hardest aspects is actually to match building size with ground scale. 15mm buildings only work for 15mm troops when the tules are man to man skirmish.
Later

are you asking in terms of scale or how much time to allot for a player to do their actions?

Movement rates are usually a function of ground scale and times scale. Most of my favorite designers look at the equation then halve or third the results to show 'wastage' (not everyone acting at the maxiumum all the time)

I would hope that a player can get through their turn in 5-10 minutes, with a norm of 3-6 turns an hour. More 'things' = more time

Three minutes. 1"/knot movement and 100yd/inch are extremely convenient and easy measurements, keep a battle inside a 6'x8-12' table, and 3 minutes is just granular enough to show the high variability in reload times in the last decades of the 19th C. The big guns take 2-3 complete turns to reload.

I'd say there were at least two approaches. One is "how long must a turn be to minimize book-keeping and markers?" This leads to horse & musket skirmish turns needing to be at least long enough to reload a musket, for instance.

The other is based on battle length and game time. If I want to fight a corps-size horse & musket action, the game must represent eight hours of time. Given I have two hours of playing time, I have to adjust the time required to play a turn or the time represented by a turn until you can represent the day in the time available. This is trickier, of course.

Whatever 'feels' right is the best answer I can give.

@Fekundar – fair enough, I'm trying to make my game more representational that say chess.

@Saber6 I'm talking about scale, if a turn is 30 seconds than a player gets to make new tactical decisions every 30 seconds; I don't think this is realistic even in the radio era. Neither do I think 'slowing troop movement down to make a turn longer is that realistic. If I'm advancing under enemy fire I'm not going to march at 1/3 pace, I'm going to step out and cross the beaten zone PDQ.

So for 7-10 minutes I'm assuming you are Napoleon. If you are a brigade commander much less.

So one variable you have to allow for is what are your subordinates doing? Depends on the period of course. But in WW2 I expect the local commander to react to local events.

Most games are "box scale." Movement is usually much, much too slow. So time is greatly distorted. For example, a horse walks at about 4 miles per hour. At 1" = 100 yards that's 70.4 inches per hour. Or 18" in a 15 minute turn. Never mind if they trot. So unless you have a very large table, you either call a turn 10 minutes (horse now move 12") or you simply slow horse down. And what if 1" = 50 yards? Now you have to play on the floor.

Then again you can trot. That's about 2-3 times as fast. So now a unit of horse should be able to easily move 36-54" per 15 minute turn.

Sure, in some turns you don't move a full move. But MOSTLY troops move at normal speed until they reach their objective or the enemy.

Now think about a WW2 game. A vehicle moving a modest 20mph at 100 yards/inch covers 352 inches per hour! Sure they don't move 20mph often. But most rules won't even allow them to move 10!

Box scale.

@ Timeportal re building scale, it's not difficult it's practically impossible if you want to use model buildings. I've always taken the simplistic approach, piece of felt = built up area, defenders have advantage of being inside.

@ Extra Crispy, I did the maths for a divisional commander so I assumed an order had to be written with some detail and repeated more than once to get it to all battalions in a brigade. I've spent time in a radio equipped command post and I have some idea of how slowly you get a formation moving even with radios.

Yes a trotting horse moves a long way and a galloping one a very long way, but and this is the important bit once a general has set a cavalry unit into a charge, he doesn't get to change his mind. It's a mind shift for people used to playing a conventional game, but if we want a reasonably accurate simulation I think it's an important one.

As to armoured vehicle speed, you may move at 20 mph for a short time in a tactical bound, but you then do hang around for a far longer period, mostly because if you're moving fast you have minimal chance of observing anything so it's always you who is going to discover the enemy; by running into his incoming round, a mistake you only really make once!

no B/S answers about variable delay either.

Variable delay solves some of the issues other people have noted

Also consider

• Most units spend most of a battle doing nothing, and then a few minutes doing something very intense. This may not be very interesting for a wargamer commanding that unit
• How long did it take to use up the ammunition?

The point I'm trying to make is that top down modeling of every detail does not make for a playable game. Most (black powder) rules are completely inconsistent between shooting distances, unit frontages, movement distances and turn time

John

In a wargame, you almost never act as a general.

You make strategic decisions, maybe some of them represent the type of strategy a general engages in. Most of the time, you are also making operational, and often tactical decisions as well. It's not uncommon for a player to make decisions above the strategic level. So your decision space is most likely a mish-mash of different levels of command.

While you give an order at one level of command, you often execute it with miniatures at a more granular level, so in effect, you are making some lower-level decisions. And being one person, when you make decisions for multiple units, you make them from the same headspace, so you innately have a unit of command across those decisions that is aspirational, but not often real for very long.

So, I don't design a turn to represent some period of time tied to a decision cycle.

A turn is the lowest level of interaction that you can adjudicate among entities represented on the board. That's what I design to.

I also don't usually design to a clock time. Time isn't real; it's an artificial concept we have to provide a common reference for measuring observed changes. I design the turn to facilitate getting the right ratios of interactions amoung the various entities involved.

So you might give an order for a formation of four companies to advance. The left two and the rightmost may do well and press, while the remaining one may need to hold, falling behind. The leftmost continues to advance. The two adjacent to the one that has fallen behind need to decide whether or not to press, pivot and support, or fall back and cover. Let's say the left one holds, waiting for the other company to catch up and the rightmost pivots to support.

All this may happen before the next "general's" decision cycle.

The same principle applies whether you are a general (something I don't design to) with five battalions, A team leader with five members breaching a building, or a DESRON on their flagship with a squadron of five other combatants.

So the point is what we don't model and the answer is massive ammounts of. At work I would plan a job in as much detail as I could than add a minimum of 30%. So in the real world on a job I did for 20+ years I was typically 30% out at best.

Where I live there can be lierally miles of hedge in sight. To look even for a retatively poorly hidden piece of kit with binoculars is going to take a lot of time. Do I want a real rule saying say 20 sec for 100yds of hedge, work out the time based on the visibileof linear hedge available from this vantage point, factor for other types of terrain in view as well and calculate the answer, NO NO and THRICE NO, so modeling viewing time time and conveying instruction time is going to be poor.

So we model about 2 1/2 min of combat type actions and call it 10 min. We get away with this as our bounds have a subroutine within then to sequence to model short furious, semic automatic action of the order of a few seconds. Tanks in combat survive only a few rounds in a serious exchange of fire and the reload automaticaly in the order of 10 seconds..

On the other end we allow for full movement within the "ten minute bound". We call it "Trasit" It needs pre-programming, need to follow a well defined route and for vehicles no super tight bends. It has unlimited distance if the veghicle can do 20mph on the surfave it is traverseing. However it can see nothing, react to nothing, and is in a mess if disturbed.

Reading accouns VERY roughly we get a speed of combat taken as a whole not wildy diffrent from the real world, given my poor real world accuracy this seems acceptable and a good enough approximatuion.

7 minutes! The turn length in my Napoleonic rules is around half an hour, but often an hour (depends on the specific battle).

@ J Webster, I appreciate troops hang a round a lot, but they don't pause in the middle of an advance, so an advance that takes 10 minutes doesn't take 3 hours with lots of tea breaks.
I'm not proposing top down modelling of every detail, my rules have a generic 'combat' table that does the job of about 5 dice roles in a normal set of rules.

@ etotheipi In a wargame, you almost never act as a general. – precisely, but shouldn't you. Obviously some people think not but that's the option I'm interested in and looking at.

@ Martin what scale are you playing, I'm looking at 15 yds to the inch and ~1:30 figure scale. If you're doing 100 yard to the inch and 1:200 figure scale then the calculation changes, not least because you're not acting as a divisional general but a Corps one.

I suspect you need to assume the local commander will do what is required at his level, thus you only need to concern yourself with more strategic concerns. Thus as long as troops are within some reasonable distance they should be able to command them to conduct close assault, conduct fire combat, advance towards the enemy, retreat and so on. Beyond that distance the local commander may do what you want him to do, but its probably not as decisive.

@Mark J Wilson

With regard to movement…my point is that it is impossible to move at those speeds in games. Built in to the game itself is the idea no one would decide to move at that speed. They make it impossible to make the game work. So they "nerf" movement to conform to the expected scale and table size.

As for the time to communicate orders, at least in the horse and musket period orders were rarely written. The use of regulating battalions greatly reduced the need to communicate to every formation. You could get the regulating battalion moving the right way and the rest of the formation would follow suit.

– precisely, but shouldn't you.

Why?

@ etotheipi. so what is the purpose of a wargame, for a hobby wargamer. I'm not interested in the military doing equipment/system simulations etc. I'm talking aobut the folks at the club on Monday.

@ Extra Criuspy, 'it is impossible to move at those speeds in games' why.

so what is the purpose of a wargame … I'm talking aobut the folks at the club on Monday.

Social interaction
Immersion in a milieu
A mental challenge
Exercising strategic thinking
Talking about the milieu
Learning from others' actions
The visual spectacle
Gestalt empathy for the person who gets that one good/bad roll

… and lastly and leastly for meL
Competition/bragging rights

(Ignoring the fact that everything, and very little in my wargaming retinue, even has a general as an entity in the game …) You pretty much have to have a highly automated military analysis/experiment/training like simulation to have the players being a general as opposed to what I described above where a player is sometimes a general, sometimes a colonel, sometimes a captain, sometimes a sergeant, sometimes a combination of multiples of those roles.

"I am playing a game. Not simulating Real Life." Then why do you even care? Either you are trying to capture the events that address that impact in real life or you want to play fantasy with historical toys. That is OK but don't even call it "historical".

Mark, you wrote "and more to the point when you wrote the rules, why did you make it that long; no B/S answers about variable delay either."

My answer: Life is not that predictable- too many external events can take time and distance friction that you (or the real life commander) doesn't have 100% control over. Say you sat down on Thanksgiving Day to watch the football game. The wife asks you to run out and get a gallon of milk. How long would it take you to do that task? Possible events that could have a bearing: Get all lights red or green?; store has not more milk on the shelf; get in the world's slowest line? Fastest line?; accident on the way to or from the store?, must get gas because you didn't fill up the night before? etc. While I am not a proponent to make the gamers account for all those possibilities, but the EFFECTS need to have a potential effect on gameplay. Gamers need to understand that " happens" and you still have to press on with your mission – play the cards dealt to you by fate. Gamers should not have total control and learning of actionable intel- how long does it take for that info to be disseminated with the staff and a decision of action is selected, drawn up and transmitted to the proper subordinate commands, and how long does it take to relay the new orders to their subordinates and actually take action to happen? Again, the results are all that matters IF the gamers have a clue as to what just happened.

@etoptheipi 'where a player is sometimes a general, sometimes a colonel, sometimes a captain, sometimes a sergeant, sometimes a combination of multiples of those roles'. Fair enough, I find this artificial and want to restrict myself to the one role.

@Dye4minis 'Gamers should not have total control and learning of actionable intel-' exactly and I think my solution prevents generals being colonels and sergeant-majors and from transmitting instant orders every minute or so to every unit, is both simple and playable and a better approximation to reality than allowing all this and then fudging the tme factor with 'variable delay'.

PS, I'm not sure if your other comment was directed at me, so I'm not responding to it for that reason.

Mark J Wilson – Problem is you can't not be many of them. Real world armys have real folk at each level making intelegent decisions.

A few words on a bit of paper (the rules) cannot replace a person so you have to make some low level deciions or the game gets evel less credible. As some level a lower commander needs to decide to put troops in a formation. There is a blance of proabilities as to which one is relevant given his current level of information and orders. He decides which one.

So while you do need asyncrononus transmission of data in some cases, eliminating decisions that cannot be made by the top level makes the system worse than interjection at other levels as far as I am concerened.

It my be argued that is also impacts turn length to some extent as you need to make a general allowance for such issues, whithout actuall maodelling all of the issues.

Many poor rules assume he is always in the best, so never suffer from being in the wrong one. In many situations that (wrong or limiting formation) is a real posibility, maybe the enemy set it up with the wrong data so he picks one not the other.

However that means that in having no requirement or allocation in the paper rules, effectievly the unit is in all possible formations at the same time, that at least to me is the ultimate failure and makes the game worthless even as entertainment.

I find this artificial and want to restrict myself to the one role.

It is artificial.

My earlier point was that if you want to restrict the player to a single role (general, or otherwise), it generally takes a huge amount of automation … or a massive reduction in the actual decision space faced by that role.

A lot of the decision space for military operations focuses on what to do when things go wrong. (What to do when things go right is the province of plans.) The simple way to make things go less than optimal for the general it so require players to execute at the colonel level, with stochastic outcome spaces. So those players go through the colonel head space in reaction to bad events and present either (1) what they think is the best representation of commander's intent, or (2) what they think is better than commander's intent.

Either way, the interactions and decisions that create the outcome that is the next input to the general are complex. If you don't have a bunch of players at multiple echelons of command, one player covers down.

If you want neither multiple players or one player with multiple roles, you have to write rules that provide the wide range of different outcomes for the general's order or write simpler rules based on a reduced set of outcomes.

@ Extra Crispy, 'it is impossible to move at those speeds in games' why.

Because the designer sets movement rates much, much lower. If infantry move 6" and a tank moves 24" max, top speed for that tank is probably what? 5mph? Why couldn't it take the risk and go ahead and move full speed – say 20mph – for a turn? Because it would break the game.

Because the designer sets movement rates much, much lower. If infantry move 6" and a tank moves 24" max, top speed for that tank is probably what? 5mph? Why couldn't it take the risk and go ahead and move full speed – say 20mph – for a turn? Because it would break the game.

We have been using a system that allows tanks to move fast without breaking the game, indeed tanks suddenly behave quite similar to real tanks. However high speed movement has its limitations in the real world and in in our rules. Moving at such speed it's not possible to shoot. The crew are concentrating on where they are going, not letting the gun hit the ground, trees, houses, bushes other vehicles and certainly not going round hairpin bends and not being capable very short unplanned changes of speed.

Moving at such speed it's not possible to shoot

Yeah, you know, not possible … except when they do.

YouTube link
YouTube link

OK guys, thanks for the replies; I think that tells me what I need to know.

Doing some reading for another reason, I ran across a couple of passages that mention max speed of trucks and in another case, halftracks not to exceed 45KPH. Can't just be for safety sake but also reduces fuel consumption.

When a normal (?) engagement range for tanks was 1,000 – 1500 yards and trying to keep it on the table, either the ground scale gets reduced or you take tha ilk that you can shoot at anything on the board.

My "other" comment, Mark, was to point out that life events are not "linear" (a task can take longer or shorter times to complete). So rather than making players account for that time (ala George Jeffries approach) "we" should only concern ourselves with the results. We cannot expect every gamer to have knowledge of the tactics and tricks used by leaders to motivate their subordinates when all we need to know is "if and when the task completion (or failure) happened". The only linear that "I" have discovered is "time" and "distance". A minute is always 60 seconds; a mile remains 5, 280 feet. Neither man nor nature exerts an influence on those constants. Add "Man" into the equation and you begin to see the effects of "Non-linear" results.

Great exchange of ideas and observations, here.

I was re-reading the Quarrie rules the other day, and he picked 2-and-a-half minutes, since that is what he needed to get the differences he wanted in regarding musketry rates, formation changes and so on. It did occur to me if you got rid of all the bath-tubbing elements then it might work okay for a divisional action, since the command and control mechanic might mean it takes that 7.5 – 10 minutes timeframe to do anything very much.
For myself, I tend to ignore what is written in any rules about timescales and work on what the movement rates actually imply.

It depends on the top position the player represents as well as the period being represented.
It also what we mean by turn. Sure time.between decisions, but with a IGYG set up we've then genrallh doubled whatever we decide that gap is.

But what about new information. If its 10 minutes I could see many things in that time I might feel makes me go through a new OODA Loop and issue new commands or decisions.
As such it useful, in a limited actor table top set up to define an actual duration to that cycle?
That can depend, again on period and our representative postion.
I've moved away generally from attaching a fixed "real time" in my systems.

Yeah, you know, not possible … except when they do.

Obviously you think I play in the middle of airfields with no trees, lamp posts (closely spaced to the road in Europe), No traffic no hulks.

Yes they can even shoot in the air, provided they have a very neat, flat, firm going and no soft bits on landing to get struck on. Suggest you look more closely at real world situations before making such statement when considering paper wargames rules.

Yes I could have rules to work out ramp gradient, ramp firmness in all 3 axes, acceptable values will dependent on ramp entry velocity and vehicle weigh, step clearance values just to start with. Then I would need lap post/tree spacing, tree strength, tree height, building height. Other misc. Obstacles distance, rotation rate of the turret vs distance to obstacle Noting any turn rate due to target movement and rate of turn and direction of turn will effect the minimum time to get the turret back in a safe position.

Clearly complexity and your devotion to extremely complex rule is far beyond what I would find useful but it in the end is what you feel is the best approximation.

Again, your psychic powers fail you.

I think nothing at all about what you play. Because that's not relevant to your statement. You said it isn't possible. Not it isn't relevant to your games.

/Also, poor attempt at a Strawman logical fallacy argument.

While the Russian one is purely a stunt, the NATO competition bit is executing actual tactics, that are used in actual combat. Whether you include those actual tactics in your games is up to you.

They do it in the open like that for safety reasons since they are training using live ammo.

May I suggest that in replying to threads such as this on a broad subject, pedentry is not a useful contribution.

@Dye4minis, My aim was to reproduce the effect of Jeffries variable length bound with a simplified [so fixed] length bound, but one that fitted with an approximation of the median time taken for a player to issue an order and get a result. or as you put it 'if and when the task is completed'; thus he cannot micromanage detail giving us a) a faster game to play b) I strongly suspect a more accurate representation.

@ Whirlwind, exactly, most rules focus on minutiae the general has no control over, thus producing a slow game and, I believe unrealistic game.

@Gamesman6, I assume a degree of overlap between moves, my opponent is issuing his orders while my troops move, then I issue more orders that cannot take effect until his troops have moved because that's my command delay time.

UshCha, might I suggest that making up things that other people say and think, then criticizing them for it is not a small detail, it is the entirety of many of your arguments.

It's equally as logically fallacious as making up facts, it just has the additional quality of being rude.

most rules focus on minutiae the general has no control over, thus producing a slow game and, I believe unrealistic game

I wouldn't call how well multiple units can execute an order and which tactical advantages are gained and lost, "minutiae".

They are key elements that drive the decision cycle. Part of a general's job is to and observe multiple different thing that are progressing as expected, less well than expected, and better than expected, then react to those changes.

The turn cycle itself is an artificiality. The job of a general is not to give an order, do nothing for a while, and then give a new order based on an instantaneous bulk update. Part of their job is to dynamically change the decision cycle in response to changing conditions.

If one unit's advance is not going well, a general might want to change their order before it's natural conclusion. Maybe they want to change a partner unit's order to maintain paces (unity of effort is more important than individual gains in that case). Maybe change the unit providing cover sire for the advance's orders to focus more (all?) effort to support the lagging unit. Of course, the subordinate commander may make that last decision on their own (following commander's intent or maybe just knowing better than the general (also, maybe having more specific low-level insight than the general)).

I would not expect a general would expend resources (TDL orders, radio call, dispatching a rider, ordering a horn blow) to the fire support unit if they thought that unit's performance was what they wanted at the moment.

The shorter step length does not solve any of these challenges in representing the general's decision space. But it does mitigate all of them.

I did some simplistic maths for a Napoleonic divisional general and came up with 7.5-10 minutes. Translate that to table top movement rules and suddenly troops go a long way in one turn, which means you don't get to micro-manage their movement.

Mark:
Napoleonic Division/Corps/Army commanders didn't micro-manage troop movements, even if in the vicinity. Movement is a problem, because in 12 minutes a line of eight battalions in line could travel 1000 yards according to British General Dundas and later Torres. In a game scaled from 50 to 60 yard to an inch, that is is 16 to 20 inches.

Point being, a commander couldn't 'micro-manage' more than one brigade, if he kept up with it. On the game table, that does demonstrate why other command methods were used. Of course, if realistic movement was portrayed in a rules set with 20 to 30 minute turns, units would be scooting across a 5 ft wide table in two or three moves. One reason some Napoleonic rules have as little as 4 second turns or the easier route: Ignore the issue altogether. Hence 6 inch movement and 'command radius.'

@McLaddie, 'Napoleonic Division/Corps/Army commanders didn't micro-manage troop movements'; no but wargamers do and can do because the rules allow them to by allowing interventions at very short time intervals. I think this is not how I want to play, however it is clear from the responses I'm in a minority of 1 so we can leave it there.

Mark J Wilson – Our own system although not Napoleonic follows what I would guess is a timeless adage. Order, counter order, leads to disorder. Changing your mind should in some cases mean that what happens in a bound is not a "safe situation" but say neither the first formation commanded is achieved or even the when it is reversed.

So you get bound one form up in X (which takes 2 to 3 bounds), is countermanded so 1 bound to get to original position, or finish in first position then start second position. I am guessing for your period but I suggest training in moving halfway though a formation change from A to B to C is rare so unlikely to be a slick well ordered change. This would apply at whatever e level is that you design. Hence a decision step which is small but more particularly slower than the action it instructs has some gains. Hence it leads to the situation above. Now that gets rid of some of the design issues, but I agree with you that many folk don't want that level of credibility. That means the rules will not have a wide appeal, welcome to my world.

Clearly this "bit" of the decision loop does not consider the data the player acts on. That needs to be accounted for in its own section of the rules. Players sometimes change their minds even without additional data.

@McLaddie, 'Napoleonic Division/Corps/Army commanders didn't micro-manage troop movements'; no but wargamers do and can do because the rules allow them to by allowing interventions at very short time intervals. I think this is not how I want to play, however it is clear from the responses I'm in a minority of 1 so we can leave it there.

Mark: Whether other rule sets 'allow' the players to do something doesn't mean meaningful rules that are truer to the physical/organizational restraints on commanders can't be created…at any time intervals you want. Whether you are in the minority as to what you want from a rules set isn't all that important. You do want you want.

@McLaddie, 'Napoleonic Division/Corps/Army commanders didn't micro-manage troop movements'; no but wargamers do and can do because the rules allow them to by allowing interventions at very short time intervals. I think this is not how I want to play, however it is clear from the responses I'm in a minority of 1 so we can leave it there.

I don't think you are in a minority of one (the very fact that authors are deliberately fudging it implies they realize there is a problem) and there has been loads of rules which are trying to minimize the micro-management. It is just a hard problem to solve, design-wise!

Whirlwind:

While I agree that it is a hard problem, I *think* a good deal of the difficulty is the need to 1. go against conventional method and wisdom and 2. To actually provide a more reasonable command process demands the designer go back to square one, [the history] and build out from there--from scratch. That can be interesting to do, exciting and innovative, but will be something that few gamers will recognize. It is harder to write concise rules when new concepts are being introduced that run counter to convention.