"Tactical Factors in Combat Systems" Topic

Most miniature rulesets include a combat system for resolving conflict between two units, which is then modified by a series of tactical factors (i.e., +2 for flank attack).

Writing in Slingshot, Richard Taylor says:

These lists of tactical factors are often the most complex and inelegant part of any ruleset. They are considered necessary in order both to reflect historical reality and to reward tactical play (there is no use cleverly maneuvering your units into a flanking position or onto favorable terrain if there is no reward in the combat system for doing so). I feel they have tended to be overused…

Do you agree?

It is OK in moderation. I have seen some rules sets with 20 or more tactical modifiers that you have to go through every time you fight a melee. This is ridiculous and slows the game down too much, in my opinion.

discussed in ref to WW1 battleships

2013 Jack Greene – World War One Battleships: A Reassessment
celesticon.com/seminars.php

Some games do go overboard. Like coopman says, OK in moderation.

They can also be used for the wrong reasons. For instance, giving a +1 to a unit if it is 'supported.'

Being supported required an action on the part of the supporting unit to be beneficial… it wasn't a position, but an action. So the actual tactical reasons for supporting units are lost and it becomes a modifier hunt.

The same thing is true for a flank attack. It had physical advantages, which in and of themselves were tactically sought after… not just a modifier to the chances of a successful attack.

They are considered necessary in order both to reflect historical reality and to reward tactical play

Tactics are reduced to figuring out how many modifiers can be gleaned for an attack… often without any relation to why tactics were used historically. It rewards the player for 'acting' historically without any of the historical rationales for such actions. There are any number of examples of this kind of thing. It only gets worse when such die modifiers multiply.

Some modifiers are fine, too many and it becomes a headache. They are just a way of presenting information instead of a more complex crt.

Personally I'd much rather have a nice efficient chart than a page full of modifiers.

So much depends on what you're trying to do – the mechanics of the systems will suggest a natural limit if the system is dice roll driven. I always think it's good to aim for no more modifiers to a dice roll than can be easily remembered without recourse to the rule book or a play sheet – but that's just me. There are other ways of representing variables – even with dice – number of dice rolled, re-rolls, double results leading to cascades, opposed rolls, stuff like that. But some find those fiddly too don't they!

It rewards the player for 'acting' historically without any of the historical rationales for such actions.

If the rules cause the players to act 'historically', not because of historical knowledge but because it makes sense rules-wise, then I'd say the rules are working properly. Isn't that one of the holy grails of rules design?

I think the reason you see the laundry list of modifiers is so the rules seem more realistic.

If you make it so veterans are hit on a 5+, regulars on 4+, then that's a dumbed down game that doesn't take into account the slope of the armor at the location hit.

Better troops should usually beat poorer troops given an open field. Romans should beat Germans, unless they meet in a rainy forest. Giving better trained/experienced troops a bonus reflects all kinds of things. Keeping formation, replacing losses at the front, how not to drive your tank when faced by enemy tanks etc. A simple modifier covers all this. Multiple modifiers often end up cancelling each other out anyway.
No matter what system you use, there are those will exploit loopholes. However, as Lupulus said, if the modifiers cause the players to use their units correctly, then the rules have achieved their purpose.

Never use them any more than in a vestigial manner and prefer not to use them at all.

If the rules cause the players to act 'historically', not because of historical knowledge but because it makes sense rules-wise, then I'd say the rules are working properly. Isn't that one of the holy grails of rules design?

That is where the disconnect between the two can happen. For instance, why did commanders have supporting lines? Did simply having a supporting line somehow make the front line fight better, so the benefit you give the front line a +1?

That isn't why supporting lines were there. It wasn't the fact they sat there that made the difference, but what they could do. I have never read any historical narratives or treatises that said the front line fought better with a supporting line standing 150 to 300 yards behind them. They do speak of the aid support could provide in battle. That would be the tactical element.

So the player may be creating supporting lines because it 'makes sense in the rules', but for reasons that have no connection to history… but that's okay because they are acting 'historically'…? Actually, they aren't.

Good article in Min.Wargames/B.Games 381 by barry Hilton touches on this aspect of rule writing.

I always think it's good to aim for no more modifiers to a dice roll than can be easily remembered without recourse to the rule book or a play sheet – but that's just me. There are other ways of representing variables – even with dice – number of dice rolled, re-rolls, double results leading to cascades, opposed rolls, stuff like that.

I'm with Rick on this. I prefer to play (and write) games that can be played pretty much from memory after the first couple of plays with recourse to the rulebook (or even QRS) only required when unusual situations come up. In my Sword & Spear rules there are no modifiers to dice rolls, and just four ways in which extra combat dice can be gained, depending on the tactical situation.
In fact, when I read the series of articles in slingshot referred to in the original post , I thought the author might like to take a look at Sword & Spear, as they address a lot of the issues he raised from his experience with other rules.

The fact is many warmers delight in VERY fine distinctions being made and their effects then are often exaggerated. Beyond some very broad and basic tactical advantages in movement, fire, melee, and rally conditions, the rest are probably more to build the illusion of "reality" in the minds of the gamers than they illustrate any true, measurable, and consistent, effect.

Some people need more support for their imaginations than others; some are more literal in their understandings, some are more comfortable with abstractions. Some people delight in citing obscure and arcane influences; some are more than content with key and inarguable factors. These things influence the expectations of the gamer in a set of rules.

The reason there are so many rules of wildly varying mechanisms, lists of factors, and style of gameplay is that there are different types of wargamers that want very different things from a wargame.

Some want to demonstrate their expertise as much as play a game; some delight in adding up 37 different factors to decide a melee (the effect of which is largely a net + or – 1 or 2), and other people want a clean, efficient, consideration of a few major factors and roll the dice!

It is true that once the pertinent factors exceed a single digit number the game is probably subtituting process for any true historical measure.

increasing numbers of "factors" and more and more tables is usually the first sign of inelegant rules and declining gameplay..

I have watched many games of a certain prominent and long-standing ancients ruleset where the "modifier count" goes through something like 15 steps of plus/minus, but ALWAYS ending up at +/- 1 or 2. I just do not get the fun or efficiency of that.

RWP: I was going to mention WRG 6th. Plus 1 this, minus one that, usually ending up with no difference. Bottom line, if your dice were terrible you routed, if they were great you went beserk.
McLaddie: You keep telling us what you don't like and why rules mechanics are not 'historical'. Why don't you offer a positive solution that is historical by your definition. I'm certainly eager to find out what this solution is.

There should not be too many or it becomes too difficult to handle.
Having 20 lines to end up mostly with +1 or -1 is a waste.

Mcladdie/ Bill H; many modifiers are there or can be there to have the players behave like they should.

Many rules should aim at having the troops (and the generals) behave the way they did back then; because the games are artificial in many ways, individual mechanics might not be historically explained, taken out of their context, but the result on the whole might.

Support for ex (rear) is one way to summarize all kind of local stuff happening and pushes the player to have a second line and fight in depth, if the time and surface etc. scales make sense to it.

So rear support is for morale (friends and enemy), and maybe some local replacement etc. Too many games have one long line no depth, which is in total opposition to history.

I fear we are going into another of those simulation long threads… fortunately I am not in the right time span to follow!

Mcladdie/ Bill H; many modifiers are there or can be there to have the players behave like they should.

Jcfrog:

I'm not a big fan of modifiers, but they can lead players to use historical tactics… and then they can simply lead players to do something that looks like it but has nothing at all to do with the cause/effect/benefits of historical tactics.

It is simply the cause and effect of a rule/modifier. It's the difference between giving someone a dollar to run real fast and that someone instead running real fast to win a race. In both cases, that someone is running fast, and could be said to be 'acting' like they are in a race--but only the latter actually is… and he may or may not get that dollar crossing the finish line…

Many rules should aim at having the troops (and the generals) behave the way they did back then; because the games are artificial in many ways, individual mechanics might not be historically explained, taken out of their context, but the result on the whole might.

Maybe, maybe not. It depends on that 'result on the whole' and we are back to cause and effect.

Support for ex (rear) is one way to summarize all kind of local stuff happening and pushes the player to have a second line and fight in depth, if the time and surface etc. scales make sense to it.

I guess my question would be, if there is a tactical advantage to fighting in depth in and of itself, why would a +1 for the front line to 'push the player' be necessary? Wargames are artificial in most all ways… The question is how those artificial rules relate to what is obviously meant to be portrayed in reality…in this case the tactical advantages of supporting lines.

Too many games have one long line no depth, which is in total opposition to history.

I agree, but isn't that a larger design problem than just the lack of a modifier? And would a plus modifier for a supporting line be a meaningful 'fix' for why supporting lines were employed 'tactically' in the first place?

A modifier's worth is what advantage/disadvantage it portrays and how players respond to it visa vie whatever it is supposed to represent. And regardless, too many clog game play.

McL--Aren't you sort of arguing against yourself here?

"I agree, but isn't that a larger design problem than just the lack of a modifier? And would a plus modifier for a supporting line be a meaningful 'fix' for why supporting lines were employed 'tactically' in the first place?"

Depending upon the scale of the game, that +1 could represent the tactical benefits of supporting lines--unless you are saying EVERYTHING has to be gamed out at 1:1 figure ratio…which is clearly impractical and therefore, I assume, is not what you mean.

And Marshall Mark, aren't extra combat dice in essence the same as die roll modifiers? Limiting the number of such modifiers (or extra dice) to 4 seems to fall in with RP's approach.

Rob

+1 for supporting lines is a great example of a possibly 'fallacious' modifier.

Would troops in the fighting line get a warmer feeling knowing that their buddies a couple of hundred metres back have their backs? Is this the +1?

Or does the formation commander get the +1 because when the front line is forced back/breaks; it can shelter behind the second line and have a better chance of reforming? In this case perhaps the +1 isn't really necessary as his broken troops are enjoying the situational, tactical, advantage of the second line's shelter.

Perhaps a low-level gamer would prefer the former whereas the higher-level gamer would prefer the latter.

It would be good fun/hard work listing as many fallacious modifiers as possible. How many can be replaced by situational rules as per Kriegspiel rather than being expressed as a factor for a probability calculation?

Situational rules have a habit of multiplying faster than rabbits, and requiring many dusty tomes to record them all.

The question is less how one modifies by situation, forces involved, and chance, but how many of such modifiers are required and necessary!

Certainly one quickly reaches a point where the effects of too many such modifiers become so muddied that is better, and more reflective of actual tactics, to keep them to a necessary few.

You get to a point where you are using modifiers more to convince the gamer that he is making historically meaningful decisions and lathering them on to convince him of how historical your rules are, at the cost of making play unclear, tedious, and slow. It becomes ridiculous when the net effect of the modifiers is zero, zilch, nada. However, some gamers are happy to be given something to do and never see just how meaningless it is to the final result. They are convinced that, somehow, what they are doing is more historically accurate than just rolling a die.

I remember a story about a Rand study of tank warfare that concluded that just flipping a coin was the most accurate tool for estimating the victor in a tank on tank combat encounter. That's a long way from Tractics.

Depending upon the scale of the game, that +1 could represent the tactical benefits of supporting lines--unless you are saying EVERYTHING has to be gamed out at 1:1 figure ratio…which is clearly impractical and therefore, I assume, is not what you mean.

Katzbalger:

It could represent any number of things at any number of figure ratios… It all depends on what it was designed to represent--what part of tactical combat is that +1 supposed to represent? Where did the idea come from?

I remember a story about a Rand study of tank warfare that concluded that just flipping a coin was the most accurate tool for estimating the victor in a tank on tank combat encounter. That's a long way from Tractics.

So the question is what tools [such as modifiers] are the most 'accurate' visa vie the combat dynamics the designer is attempting to emulate--and the simpliest to reproduce.

WRT supported lines, it is notable that contemporaries like Jomini and Clausewitz never even considered the possibility that infantry would deploy in a single line. So perhaps unsupported troops should get a huge minus….where are all our mates?

The fact that daft war games rules on interpretation make it impossible to use a second line effectively perhaps points to issues with rules.

An issue with modifiers in rules is whether they could represent intentional choices by the historical commanders, or whether they are purely circumstantial – i.e. a circumstance that gave one side a benefit, but that was not the result of an intentional choice process.

The rules might then distort the historical equivalent tactics. Players will play such that they gain benefits from the modifiers, but the equivalent RL tactical situations could not allow for these choices, because commanders were not intentionally aware of them, or because of doctrine, or weapon choices etc.

E.g. in WW2, Russian infantry might get a – modifier in combat compared to the Germans. But why exactly? Because the record shows that Russians were less well trained?
It might result in players playing more defensively with Russian troops than was the case historically.

In other words, modifiers might reflect an historical outcome post-factum, but since the modifiers are built in the rules before the game, players will act upon them intentionally. That might or might not distort things.

The fact that daft war games rules on interpretation make it impossible to use a second line effectively perhaps points to issues with rules.

Yes, the issues might be far deeper than a simple modifier.

In other words, modifiers might reflect an historical outcome post-factum, but since the modifiers are built in the rules before the game, players will act upon them intentionally. That might or might not distort things.

Yes, it goes back to what those modifiers represent and how the game dynamics play out visa vie historical tactics.

You get to a point where you are using modifiers more to convince the gamer that he is making historically meaningful decisions and lathering them on to convince him of how historical your rules are, at the cost of making play unclear, tedious, and slow. It becomes ridiculous when the net effect of the modifiers is zero, zilch, nada. However, some gamers are happy to be given something to do and never see just how meaningless it is to the final result. They are convinced that, somehow, what they are doing is more historically accurate than just rolling a die.

Yep. Isn't imagination and pretending a wonderful thing? Gamers will inject 'meaning' into even the ridiculous if they don't know [or care about] the net effect compared to history. Gamers become very practiced at it. After all, it's just a game.

As every wargamer I know, I have tried my hand at writing my own ruleset for a favourite period. I've never finished even a single one, but the exercise helped me to understand how rules interact and how they might or might not be related to actual history. Supported lines is one of my favourites. At first, as many others, I went for the +1 combat modifier idea, but I wasn't satisfied and so I changed to +1 morale modifier. Still not satisfied. Then I began to think what I intended to represent: the presence of reserves near the front, either to plug a gap on the line or take advantage of a breakthrough. I realized that what I intended couldn't be represented by some modifier, so I went back to my basic draft and decided that to represent the importance of reserves in battles I needed to change how combat affected the first line units. I made combat more exhausting (it was a Medieval set, by the way); after a couple of rounds of melee a first line unit was usually so spent due to exhaustion that it became almost ineffective. I asked my son and a friend of his to try the combat rules, without telling them anything about my intentions. After a couple of combats both started to deploy reserves in a second line.

I hate "plus one minus one" approaches. Give a blanket effect for broad tactical positioning, e.g. flank attacks, and leave it alone….

All,

In the pure sense, any combat modifiers you create for a historical based combat model is an admission that you have made a logic or system error with Your basic design that has created the need to make an administrative correction for this error.

Basically, I think the source of this error stems form two (2) root cause areas. The first is from internal system/process error, as with your Fire Combat system. The second is the result of the overall Design Architecture where the incompatiability (i.e. interface) of two overlapping battlefield systems (such as Fire & Morale/Cohesion) induces an error that requires one or the other system to apply an error correction factor also known as a 'modifier'.

For non-historical based combat systems, it really doesn't matter what you do, because it's all the result of subjective reasoning.

Happy Holidays

After a couple of combats both started to deploy reserves in a second line.

That is much more 'organic' to the system. The system, not a shiny plus one leads players to 'act historically'. If the environment and combat dynamics mimic history, then players will act within that environment along historical lines… and supporting lines. That is closer to my idea of 'elegant' game design.

McLaddie, after basileus66:

That is much more 'organic' to the system. The system, not a shiny plus one leads players to 'act historically'. If the environment and combat dynamics mimic history, then players will act within that environment along historical lines… and supporting lines. That is closer to my idea of 'elegant' game design.

Do players actually want elegant game designs that depend on an 'emergent' behaviour per basileus66's rules, or do they actually prefer a shopping list of atts and dets – because the latter are easier to calculate and comprehend whereas the former require vision, forethought, and imagination?

Do players actually want elegant game designs that depend on an 'emergent' behaviour per basileus66's rules, or do they actually prefer a shopping list of atts and dets – because the latter are easier to calculate and comprehend whereas the former require vision, forethought, and imagination?

Stoppage:

Like most things, I'd say 'it all depends.' Instead of being handed a list of modifiers, elegant game designs do require you to learn the dynamics of play to 'realize' the historical cause and effect relationships of tactics…but such games can be far simpler [e.g. part of that elegance] if done well.

As for what gamers want--I seriously doubt that it is an either/or dichotomy of shopping lists vs elegant or that all gamers want one type of game over the other. Most gamers I know, and that includes me, while having favorites, like more than one 'type' of wargame design or experience.

Not over-used but used incorrectly. Over-use being just one type of potentially flawed design.

A turn needs to evaluate what happened in a slice of time. The bigger the slice of time, the more factors that will need to be considered to get a realistic outcome – if realism is a design goal. Otherwise the model is too primitive, much like an early equation model.

If the time slice is smaller, then the number of factors should be smaller. The action on the tabletop is not aggregated but more granular, so any factor that is the result of aggregation should disappear.

For example, a game that uses individual figures won't need flank attack factors because the attack will be fought blow by blow. A game that uses 1 base per unit will need factors because the combat is at a higher level of abstraction.

Another reason for avoiding factors at detailed level is probability theory. Adding +1 to 100 dice rolls may result in wild shift in outcome e.g. from a 50:50 to 95:5 relative chance of success. Few wargamers understand that the more dice rolls, the less variance in the outcome in an uneven match. But At the aggregate level there is usually one roll, so more differentiation is needed. Either that or make the potential outcome more random.

A popular set of ECW rules gave troops a combat factor and some +1's for extra pistol etc. To this was added a dice roll. It was easy to see who would win before combat took place. So why would the weaker unit ever fight? Yet the list of factors was short.

"Correct" designs should be the designer's goal.

From a different direction:

Colin Powell's 40-70 rule: If you only have enough information to ensure less than 40% probability of success then you are 'shooting-from-the-hip'; if you wait until you have enough information to ensure more than 70% probability of success then you've over-egged the pudding, gilded-the-lily, etc. Therefore you should act when you have enough information to ensure between 40% and 70% probability of success.

If we assume that factors determine relative strengths and that we can then calculate the advantage of one side over another:- We should only attack when we have 40%-70% probability of success/advantage over the other side; the defender should only hang around when he has 40%-70% chance of repelling the attacker.

Is this in any way remotely useful for answering the OP's question? or finding a solution for too-few/too-many factors?

In my soon to be released rules I have replaced a lot of the modifiers with D6 of different values for different troop types. You can still go up and down the different color dice scale, but what you roll is the final number, no add or subtract. I have found that it speeds up play a little bit and I only have a few modifiers that change the dice color rolled for both shooting and melee.

Allen

There's a balance to these things.
There's a lot of pleasantry from a game where "what you rolled is what you rolled".

Rolling the dice, tallying up modifiers, then realizing that the good roll wsa actually a bad one is pretty disheartening.

On the flipside, trying to account for factors through rules can get difficult to keep track of.

I play WWII and there are only 4 factors I really see the NEED to keep track of: Did the firer move? Did the target move? What terrain is the target in? Short or long range?

I dont care about muzzle velocity, angle of armor, hit location, type of shell (AP is assumed if its an armored target, duh!), how hot it is, barometric pressure, time of day, cloudiness, wind velocity, it's direction, the gunner's mother's maiden name…it could go on and on.

Simulations are best left to computers that dont get bored (or confused) with minutia. Its a war GAME!

I dont care about muzzle velocity, angle of armor, hit location, type of shell (AP is assumed if its an armored target, duh!), how hot it is, barometric pressure, time of day, cloudiness, wind velocity, it's direction, the gunner's mother's maiden name…it could go on and on.

Simulations are best left to computers that dont get bored (or confused) with minutia. Its a war GAME!

Successful simulation games have been around for a long time. Only computer simulations [and some military and hobby designers] attempt to detail that kind of minutiae,but certainly not all of them. There are lots and lots of simulations and simulation GAMES that succeed without being computers or trying to incorporate that kind of shopping list of trivia.

As engineer Jerry Banks says in Handbook of Simulations A simulation design "should be complex enough to answer the questions raised, but not too complex…Complexity can destroy even the best designs."

And he works with both computer and non-computer simulations. Burdening a system with too much detail, attempting to do too much, is a problem for simulations as well as any game designs. The quality or value of a simulation isn't in the amount of factoids that can be crammed into it. Quality is about what a simulation design does, not how much detail it includes or how many variables it has crammed into it. The same is true for wargames.

WIth tabletop games there's a more unique problem:

Representing a factor with a modifier (for example) may actually over-state the frequency or importance.

An example: I was digging around recently on small arms malfunction rate and found one source that referenced a study where a well-maintained M16 suffered 2 malfunctions per 1000 rounds while a well-maintained AK suffered 1 per 1000 rounds.

So on one hand,that means our M16 is twice as likely to jam.
On the other hand, 1 in 500 rounds is likely to be the soldiers entire ammunition supply. Even if we assigned a 1% chance, that's increasing the base chance by a huge amount.

Dear Weasel

The fault is in the stories. We read books, in the WWII genre for example, where we're standing at the table next to Hitler in the Wolfschanze and he's bellowing at Keitel "What's that 2-3-6 doing there Keitel?! Explain it!?" and on the next page we're being told about Sgt. Stumpf scrambling for his last magazine for his Schmeisser to hold off a KV-1, he gets it in and it jams. The author is trying to tell the story from top to bottom but we make the mistake of a moral equivalency because the author has put two stories on the same level and we think we have to have rules for them. Thus the theory of the need for modifiers.

You are correct there is in fact an infinity of distance between 0% and 1%

And again, anyone ever heft 1,000 rounds? Believe me, it weighs a lot. A better yardstick would be to work it the other way. In an action a soldier might fire off 200 rounds or so (and having fired that, it's a lot. So if the rate is 2 per 1000 then the percentage of jam in the expenditure of 200 rounds is .01 or one one hundredth PERCENT! Got a die for that, or another way the simple 2/1000= .002 or two one thousandths percent that any particular round will jam.

If someone suggested rolling for that you'd say he was mad, so why bother.

Getting a sprained ankle or tripling over your own bootlaces or shooting yourself in the foot is higher.

Representing a factor with a modifier (for example) may actually over-state the frequency or importance.

Not only in regards to its overall effect or influence, but it may also be something like bird-walking with the design: sticking in the modifier does nothing to enhance the focus of the game or what the designer has chosen to portray.

Dear Otto.

I fully support the inclusion of "Sprained ankle" tables in tabletop miniatures games :-)

Especially if they are Battalion level.

Enjoy christmas sir.

Could someone post me the conclusive statistical evidence that units supported by other units didn't fight more effectively than ones which didn't have that support please? If the answer is "they did, but it was all down to the tactical positioning" could someone post the conclusive statistical evidence for that too? Thanks.

I doubt any such evidence exists for or against.

The question when writing a mechanic is whether you make it explicit (+1 for having a unit on the flank) or is it just that if I have 3 units fighting 1, I get more shots than you do anyways.

I doubt any such evidence exists for or against.

I did too. But comments on this thread indicated that some posters have no such doubts, so I'm sure this certainty is based on the most comprehensive statistical analysis.

The question when writing a mechanic is whether you make it explicit (+1 for having a unit on the flank) or is it just that if I have 3 units fighting 1, I get more shots than you do anyways.

Well, maybe. But OTOH it is certainly conceivable that there are effects on the battlefield which are purely psychological, in place of or to extend physical phenomena. Flanking is a good point: there appears to be a purely psychological negative factor to being outflanked, above the increased physical effects from enfilade fire and numerical superiority at the point of contact.

Yeah, for sure.

I think ultimately it comes down to "emphasis". When I write, I look at it like this:

Let's say I write a set of Battalion level rules for WW2.

I can pick out maybe 20 things to put in that game and of those, 2 or 3 will be a focus.

There's going to be 10.000 things I didn't factor in.

Since any game is inevitably going to be an abstraction, what we chose to emphasize is going to flavour the game a lot.
If my game makes flanking important enough that it influences the rules, then that sends signals about the kind of game it is going to be and that will influence what happens on the table.

If I leave it out, then it'll be less of a factor. Now, that is probably less realistic but maybe that page space saved means I put in better rules for something else. Or maybe it just means I can cut down the bulk overall.

Maybe this stuff is all just a big argument for relying on a GM to give you the odds at any given time, instead of having modifiers and charts :-)

There are a number of interesting studies about the psychological impact of being outflanked for modern armies. Certainly, black powder armies and earlier saw being outflanked as critical.

Personally, apart from one comment of a 95th Rifle officer appreciating the support the formed light infantry provided the Rifles' skirmish lines, I have never seen any comments to suggest that there was some front line-psychological-benefit or rationale for having a supporting line.

Considering that most infantrymen couldn't see beyond their battalion when formed up and certainly wouldn't see the troops behind them 150 to 300 yards behind them [as per most SOPs], I don't see any support for the combat bonus for having 'support.' From the designers' notes I have seen, all of them state such 'support benefits' was to encourage players to 'act historically', rather than thinking about how the tactical benefits of supports actually worked…which generals DO describe in some detail… and the psychological benefits to the first line are not mentioned. Does that mean there were no psychological benefits? I don't know, but it certainly is a possibility. The issue is that the military men of the period never saw any such benefits as important enough to mention, let alone as a reason to have supports.

This is just an example of modifiers becoming a substitute for tactical actions.

From the designers' notes I have seen, all of them state such 'support benefits' was to encourage players to 'act historically', rather than thinking about how the tactical benefits of supports actually worked…which generals DO describe in some detail… and the psychological benefits to the first line are not mentioned. Does that mean there were no psychological benefits? I don't know, but it certainly is a possibility. The issue is that the military men of the period never saw any such benefits as important enough to mention, let alone as a reason to have supports.

I can't answer to the second point without hitting the books to an extent impossible for me at the moment, but I can speak to the first point.

Paddy Griffith makes the following comment in his rules:

…it had often been found from experience that a single line of battalions was a very weak formation, and required some sort of reserve. Putting one brigade behind another was damaging to morale, since the men of the front line brigade would be unfamiliar with their supporting line, and would feel uneasy.

So at least one eminent Napoleonic historian and gamer has explicitly made that link.

I can pick out maybe 20 things to put in that game and of those, 2 or 3 will be a focus.

There's going to be 10.000 things I didn't factor in.

But ideally the top 2 or 3 will be the things that seem to have the greatest effect in real life, similarly the next 17-18. I imagine it is quite rare that out comes are determined equally by 10,000 things: certainly the outcome of combat appears to be mainly influenced by fewer.