"Post-WWII Wargaming: No Fun?" Topic

Does the increasing technology take the fun out of post-WWII wargaming?

You still have to make decisions, and isn't that what it's all about?
Did the musket take all the fun out of warfare? Did tanks?

Boooooo…
I just noticed.
Dear Editor in Chief can change the titles of HIS threads, but we peons can't.
Boooooo….

Nope, much more interesting.

Lots of different ways to eliminate your opponents.

… but we peons can't…

It's good to be the King!

I think Cold War conventional games can be fun but I have little interest in COIN asymmetrical games. Near peer all the way for me please.

Tons of fun to be had post wwii

I should mention that the poll question was inspired by a comment from an anonymous author reviewing a modern ruleset…

Most (but not all) of my wargaming is post-WWII and I have great fun at it.

ultramodern gaming can be great fun, but you need to pay careful attention to your scenario victory conditions. A simple "kill them all" isn't much fun when it's M1A1s versus export T72s.

Adds to it vice from it.

Modern Asymmetric warfare doesn't do much for me Western power vs poorly armed fighters from some backwater holds no interest.

Cold war gone hot has always interested me though I've never gamed it.

My modern gaming is really confined to playing imaginations using AK-47 it gives me the chance to paint up modern toys and have fun though clearly it probably bears little resemblance to Modern warfare as the serious gamer of the period would recognise it.

The simple answer is yes. If you stick to cold war gone hot then its not much diffrent to WWII except more radios, more accurate tanks and bigger ranges. Add drones and battle management and its more challenging to play. The quantity of information and the ability to deal with it becomes harder. If anybody spots a target everybody does. This means more complex battle plans even on the table, even with simple rules it makes it challenging in s good way. We only play where both sides have a chance. Masssively asyematic battles have no interest for me. At some level like in Russia in WWII quantity has a quality all of its own, which is OK so Nato vs better WARPACis OK. Plus you get to play with new stuff. Dark roumors are arround that the 1:144 Teminator by AORS Shipyards is almost in production. Guns and thermobaric rockets! awsome!

Personally, I find armoured warfare post M1/Chally a little tedious. Invincible supertanks shooting up helpless opponents.

However, 1960 to 1983, blast away. More modern asymmetrical warfare is also very interesting.

Perhaps rough on the Soviets/W.P. for the first six days against the Brits, but on day seven, when they're out of ammo, things quickly go the other way.

Found that little tidbit while looking around on the net about Cold War scenarios.

Not sure how much ammo the Americans had for their tanks.

I enjoy Cold War gaming, even with the supertanks. Like Lion of the Stars says, you have to pay attention to the scenario to make it more than a mobile firing squad. Iraq is a poor model for scenarios. 1 side with 2d rate equipment, 3d rate ammo and 4th rate command and control took on the US in the only war in our history we were actually prepared for ahead of time. The Soviets would have been far better prepared in Fulda. Try matching a company or 2 of M1A1s/Chally 2s against a tank regiment backed up by air and a couple regiments of Front artillery.

It's still a lot of fun.

I greatly enjoy Vietnam and Laos. Very few wargamers seem to really read on this period. The historical scenarios are endless with tremendous variety. I play with 1 figure equaling 1 man. They often play like Hollywood, but are real.

The rescue of the American civilian nurse Maggie O'Brien from the VC held Chau Doc during Tet.

Bo Gritz and the Mobile Guerrilla Force recovering the black box from a crashed U.S. spy plane.

ARVN Airborne with M-72 LAWs facing NVA T-54s at An Loc in 1972.

NVA sappers attack Firebase Airborne during the battle for Hamburger Hill.

Main Force VC convoy ambushes.

Jungle busting with M-113 ACAVS and M-551 Sheridans to rescue a trapped American unit.

Hatchet Force with a recoilless rifle set up overlooking the Ho Chi Minh trail and stopping traffic.

Rescue of downed pilots by an aero rifle platoon supported by gunships.

Ands the list goes on.

Tom

I've found my gaming shifting away from "can my team/army list beat his team/army list" type of games to "can I win while preserving my force" to "can I keep my individual dudes alive during their tour of duty". To that end, same side games or solo games work best, which makes post-ww2 games a lot more appealing. Like Gary Owen, I too have a taste for vietnam games, so that genre scratches my itches for both belt buckle grabbing firefights and modern weaponry. I also like games in settings similar to Iraq, where you have different victory conditions to just "stomp the other dude". So no, post-ww2 isn't boring for me at all.

At the end, even in Afghanistan and Iraq, we're down to infantry patrols.

The power of gadgetry gets overstated too. The coalition would have won in Iraq, even they had the T72's.

I think it can be a lot of fun, especially for skirmish

One thing – it seems to me further to Mako 11's cogent observation that a lot of post WWII gaming – especially modern or near post-modern – assumes that there is a ready supply of replacements/reinforcements in the pipe

Given that most Western armies as at best modestly sized and that most tank production lines are idle (I think the US makes about 60 tanks a year) it seems to me that fairly quickly into the fighting – even, as noted by Mako after a week or so – one might have a problem with not many goods on the shelf

Then I guess we might be taking the grease off the old stuff and getting it running again!

No.

I think the technology in post-WWII doesn't really affect the fun of the tabletop wargame, which, for me, is dealing with a complex decision space. It changes some aspects of the type of decisions you face, but you still face a series of challenging decisions.

Only post WW2 I have played is Skirmish Sangin; found it a very enjoyable game.

If you don't like tech that automatically hits when it's fired, like many ultra-modern weapons almost do, go with the 1950s – 1970s era, when missiles sucked, or were non-existent, and some weapons were little better than their WWII forerunners.

"Try matching a company or 2 of M1A1s/Chally 2s against a tank regiment backed up by air and a couple regiments of Front artillery."

I'd much rather do that with a battlegroup of Chieftans or Leo 1s, which is why my WW3 is set in 1981.

Real men play WW3 in 1946 :)

Pershings, T44 (if you're lucky) and a bunch of conscripts that really don't want to fight anyone, anymore.

Ww2 is boring to if you add technology. Tanks are and always will be boring, don't mater if they are shermans, tigers, T90s or Abrahams.

If you are going to game ww1 and up it must be small scale personal stuff or its just pushing technology at each other.

As others have said, the key to a good modern game (or any game for that matter) is thoughtful and creative scenario design. A good modern scenario will challenge both sides and will mitigate the overwhelming strengths of all sides to make a good game possible. Interesting and challenging victory conditions also help to make a game more lively.
You can have a Soviet Motor Rifle Company in BTR-60's supported by a four-tank platoon of T-62's assaulting a dug-in, platoon-sized, British Mechanized infantry position but that gets old real fast. More interesting is playing a Soviet "Road-opening Detachment" trying to deal with obstacles and light enemy covering forces ahead of the main force.
Then there is the world of asymmetrical warfare in the modern era. The possibilities for scenarios and enjoyable, yet challenging games are nearly endless.
So, yes! Modern warfare can be just as enjoyable and challenging as any other period if you do your research and use thought and creativity in the design and execution of your scenarios.
Cheers and good gaming … In all eras.
Rod Robertson.

DOn't forget the plentiful scenarios when things DON'T go according to plan :-)

Yeah, the MR company should be assaulting the Mech Inf platoon but the BTR's broke down, the Brit reinforcements got lost because their map is 20 years out of date.
Meanwhile the Soviet commander is drunk and the Brit commander stepped on a mine.

I'm still waiting to find out. Getting into AK-47 Republic late, waiting on figure/vehicle orders to finish coming in so I can organize my troops and get ready for a game.

Gunfreak,
You clearly have little understanding of combined arms. It is only the tank and its allies that freed us from WW1 trenches. Technology is great when it works and is not quite the edge it is made up to be by its manufactures. The Germans did not win WWII for all there advanced technology. You may get that from poorly written rules onthe wrong groundscale on unrealistic tables (wait I just described a famous set of rules) but that is not actualy true.

In any game its only as interesting as the scenario. Currently we are on a 2 evening game where its an attack and the counter attack. Ideal for post WWII where combined arms is the norm.

Don't forget the dangerous fauna for AK-47, if you're gaming in Africa – lions, leopards, crocs, hippos, gorillas, rhinoceri, other large four-legged animals with nasty tempers, and perhaps even sharp horns, etc., etc., to add a little color to your games.

Methinks a lot of fun ! ..and new dimensions of 'tactical decision-making' abound in the modern period.

As others have said, the key to a good modern game (or any game for that matter) is thoughtful and creative scenario design. A good modern scenario will challenge both sides and will mitigate the overwhelming strengths of all sides to make a good game possible. Interesting and challenging victory conditions also help to make a game more lively.

couldn't agree more !

Methinks it is the game scenario of "you line up on that side and I'll line up on this side ..and we will fight over the middle for 6 turns" game-scenario/design that makes for a lesser challenge…doesn't matter if you are playing with ancient/medieval forces or sci-fi squadrons.

I used to play a lot of microarmour (eg.'Challenger 2' rules) but moved on when it became a predictable stand-off slugfest. ie: not much different to most WW2 games.. just at greater ranges.
I then started playing Vietnam games, and soon after AK47 which lend themselves to a mindset where you have to be far more tactically inventive, and utilise your 'assets' more thoughtfully. Modern weaponry is a force multiplier and can be enormously destructive ..so you gotta get it right vs. someone who knows what they are doing.

I am still playing these nearly 20 years later.

Consider that the wargames we play ..especially 'conventional modern' games (like the Microarmour I used to play) are likely nearly always (unconsciously) set in the first three days of the conflict. By the end of week two of a modern war (eg. in Europe) it will look less like "Team Yankee", and more like "Twilight 2000" (or '1946' for that matter).
Here's where I think the design cleverness of AK47 shows, I suggest AK47 is a far more 'realistic' game than it was intended to be, or appears at first glance.

I personally enjoy the COIN games' thought process/ decision making…(I enjoy playing the outgunned guerillas the most)…Vietnam era games is the historical pinnacle of this genre methinks. (Ultramodern middle-east as a genre is likely catching up but I don't have the same experience in gaming here.)

African COIN and 'Company skirmish'(eg. AK47) games allows scenario development to be more 'hypothetical'/fictional wrt to methods and equipment…so there is more "what if" allowed here , whereas the Vietnam theatre games attracts its' share of purists who don't enjoy stretching too far from "historical" gaming.

Whatever the period / setting ; effort put into good scenario design makes for the best games.

oh yeah ! and

DOn't forget the plentiful scenarios when things DON'T go according to plan :-)

!..what he said !