"rules that trade one aspect for another" Topic

It's interesting to me that so many rules seem to struggle to provide a good combination of combined arms. Some have great infantry rules with little or no (or off-hand afterthoughts) way to deal with vehicles/big beasties, or cavalry, or whatever. It's just struck me that it is surprisingly common.

What is the reason that rules that are so good at one thing can barely manage a sideways glance at another thing?

Perhaps that innovative and imaginative models which work for aspects of warfare, don't work so well for others. Crossfire being the obvious example.

I suspect merging all, especially for modern warfare, with aircraft and helos too, is difficult, since few people have the background in all aspects to produce a decent set of rules.

I'm still looking for the holy grail as well, for both WWII and Moderns, especially at the sharp end, e.g. platoon and company level (1:1 for vehicles, and fireteams or squads for the infantry), up to battalion level, for the attackers.

I'm especially interested in a decent level of granularity (enough to make it interesting), yet with quick play, and somewhat streamlined game mechanics, so it doesn't take forever to figure out if hits and casualties/damage have occurred, or if morale has failed.

In my humble opinion, that means D6s are out, and you need at least D10s, D12s, or D20s for To-Hit and Damage/Casualty resolution.

Percentile dice may be going a bit too far, in many cases, since they may slow down play, especially if people want to take potshots on 1% – 2% chances.

This may be true for 20th Century wargames, where, for example, a ruleset that focuses on infantry combat at the platoon level is not going to work so well for tank vs tank combat.
However, I don't think it's true in general. In my experience, most pre 20th Century rules don't focus on one particular type of combat, and aim to deal with all arms with equal importance (normally being infantry, cavalry and artillery for horse and musket, or infantry, cavalry and others for ancient & medieval).

Specificity.

Any model of a combat interaction is incomplete. Then we optimize those models by simplifying them (for ease/speed of play) or detailing them (for richness of experience). Different combat interactions need different parts of the underlying model changed in different ways. The more changes and types of combat interactions, the harder it is to integrate them into a whole and "balance" the meta-interactions.

A meta-interaction is the interaction in the broader state space between two different types of interaction. I've figured out how snipers interact with formed units. I've figured out how area detonations interact with formed units. But optimizing both makes it difficult to implement how snipers and area detonations interact with formed units.

Meta-interactions also drive complexity. The complexity increases based on triangular numbers. With one interaction, A, you need to understand A. With A and B, you need to understand A, B, and AB (possibly BA, depending on how you are set up). With A, B and C, you need A, B, C, AB, AB, BC. A, B, C, D? A, B, C, D, AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD. You can see how complexity of the composite model grows quickly.

QILS treats combat interactions abstractly instead of specifically. It's a different trade-off. By working abstractly, you are not manipulating the normal parameters we use to think about weapons and interactions (range, lethality, etc.). You can still represent any combat interaction set you want (QILS is a Turing machine; it can do the same functional things as any other Turing machine. The differences in implementation come down to efficiency and flow.).

Part of the reason is that the scales for the different arms have become so different. Shrinking the modeled area to make infantry combat interesting generally means playing with ranges that constrict tanks and artillery.

The best mix that I've seen that maintains the flavor of both is: infantry squads, and individual tanks and guns, with very little air power. If you want to play with tank formations, you can't help but abstract infantry into less-exciting blobs — and shifting infantry down to individual soldiers makes the other arms too dominant.

(Note that I ignore non-modern wars in my comment. The range-and-impact problem is not a significant challenge until the 20th Century.)

First I'll nominate a set of rules that handles Armor and Infantry very well, Fireball Forward. Other sets handle armor or infantry in a more detailed manner but FF gives them equal emphasis with a very nice result. Even here arty and air power effects are highly abstracted.

Why is it so hard – ASL is probably the only rules set that handles Armor, Infantry, Arty, and Air Power on the battlefield in equal measure and well – the size of the tome speaks for itself.

Quick note on ASL: if you go that direction, I recommend the Starter Kits rather than the entire game. Much of the depth of ASL's rules come from addressing every possible situation, rather than sticking to the general ones. (Which the Starter Kits do.)

And, yes, I was thinking of the original Squad Leader when I was talking about infantry squads, etc.